5 October 2026
10 new episodes (8.9 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 47 highlight clips below (138 mins total).
Investment 5 October 2026 · 47 clips
Alt Goes Mainstream
Josh PristawClarion Partners
Josh Pristaw is president of Clarion Partners, the $73.3 billion real estate investment firm within Franklin Templeton's alternatives platform, with about 95% of its capital in open-end funds and $42 billion in US industrial property. He has invested in real estate since 1997, including 17 years running a Brazil business and a period at a single-family rental operator with 100,000 homes.
-
1 of 2 prediction
Clarion Partners' Josh Pristaw argues that evergreen funds holding large data centres may have to meet redemptions by selling their apartments, warehouses and self-storage, because the data centres will find few buyers at core returns.
Jones Lang LaSalle counts about $1 trillion of new data-centre supply, nearly all of it built to lease up and sell, and he expects the space to let. The shortage is of buyers willing to hold at a core return, and when wealth investors queue to redeem, as some now are in private credit, the pressure falls on the part of the fund that can be sold.
-
2 of 2 current issue
Clarion Partners counts 10,000 Americans turning 80 every day, about 10% of whom move into senior housing, and puts meeting that demand at five times the current development pipeline, sustained for 15 years.
Pristaw treats demographics as close to inevitable: barring a pandemic or war, the number of people at each age 5 to 20 years out can be projected region by region, and historically the ability to live safely alone declines from 80.
Monetary Matters
J MintzmyerValue Investors Edge
J Mintzmyer founded Value Investors Edge in 2015, a 13-person research shop covering about 50 shipping companies, and wrote his PhD on using AIS ship-tracking data to map sanctions and trade flows.
-
1 of 3 framework
Value Investors Edge's J Mintzmyer reads the tanker boom in three layers: spot rates he expects to come down within days or weeks, ship values that need about $150,000 a day for two to three years, and listed owners that do well on $120,000 to $130,000.
A freight ETF built on forward freight agreements two to three months out is the purest exposure to the rate layer. A 10-year-old VLCC at about $152 million, on numbers he ran a couple of weeks ago, is very rich but defensible while one-year charters pay near $170,000.
-
2 of 3 current issue
J Mintzmyer, who wrote his PhD on mapping trade with AIS ship-tracking data, says real-time AIS in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be trusted, and estimates flows are back to roughly 70% to 80% of pre-war levels.
In some instances a ship appears to sit still for two or three weeks and then reappears, so a live count misses vessels in transit and only a week or two of hindsight settles the numbers. His estimate is 12 to 14 million barrels moving out of the region against closer to 20 million before the conflict, with Iranian flows more or less choked off.
-
3 of 3 prediction
Value Investors Edge's J Mintzmyer expects China to shift every iron ore cargo it can from Australia to Guinea for supply security, a route more than three times as long that lifts ton-mile demand even if imports stay flat.
China has spent a decade building bauxite and then iron ore capacity in Guinea, with the Simandou mine the iron ore case. Rates for the largest bulk carriers have moved from about $20,000 to $50,000 a day, the order book is only slightly above average and the fleet is similarly old to the tanker fleet, though a global recession or a Chinese manufacturing recession would undo the case.
Alpha Exchange
Harley Bassman
Bassman created the MOVE index of implied rate volatility in 1994, with data back to 1988, and was at Merrill Lynch through that year's bond sell-off. He has about 40 years in rates, mortgages and risk analysis and writes the Convexity Maven commentary.
-
1 of 3 current issue
Harley Bassman cites estimates of about $750 billion of borrowing this year by the five hyperscalers, roughly a third of the US government's new debt of about $2 trillion, and calls it entirely rate insensitive.
Every dollar that buys a hyperscaler bond is a dollar not buying Treasuries, so the whole curve has to clear higher while the old marginal buyers fade. Non-bank private credit, outside the Fed's reach, blunts policy at the front end as well.
-
2 of 3 current issue
Harley Bassman reads the 150 basis point rise in US yields as a loss of trust in fiscal control, since 10-year breakeven inflation has sat near 2.35% for four years.
A 6% deficit with no war, no recession and no agreed path back is what he says bond buyers are now charging for, and Japan and Western Europe are in no better shape. Equities hold because a company can reprice its goods as the currency loses value, which on his account is how shareholders in Weimar Germany came through the hyperinflation.
-
3 of 3 contrarian
Harley Bassman argues higher short rates may now add to US demand, on a figure he credits, with a caveat, to Albert Edwards: US companies' net interest is close to zero or positive.
Cash-rich boomers and corporations earn more on their balances with every hike, and Warren Buffett, holding about $380 billion in short-dated Treasuries on the episode's figure, collects more than anyone. With private lenders making the loans and the hyperscalers borrowing regardless of price, Bassman doubts a 100 basis point move reaches the economy at all.
Capital Allocators
Stephen McLennanOntario Teachers' Pension Plan
Co-Chief Investment Officer of Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, a $300 billion fund covering 346,000 active and retired teachers, where he runs asset allocation and the regional offices. He joined in 2003 on the credit desk and has since worked across natural resources, infrastructure and Total Fund Management, sharing the CIO seat with Gillian Brown since 2024.
-
explainer
Ontario Teachers' runs leverage, liquidity and funding as one unit and calibrates its liquidity with a pension version of a bank's liquidity coverage ratio, under a board limit.
McLennan names three ways an investor gets pushed out of a conviction: a liquidity event, losing the money, and doing things stakeholders are not fans of. He points to US endowments in the GFC and to Canadian pensions whose leverage lacked a comprehensive liquidity framework, and which became forced sellers at very inopportune times.
Big Technology Podcast
Dylan Patel and Jordan NanosSemiAnalysis
Dylan Patel founded and runs SemiAnalysis, the research firm that coined the term neocloud and now tracks 323 GPU cloud providers. Jordan Nanos, of its technical staff, wrote ClusterMax 3.0, its ranking of those clouds on reliability, security and performance.
-
1 of 2 contrarian
SemiAnalysis puts Anthropic's inference gross margin at 75% or a little above, Salesforce's level, which took the software company a long time to reach.
Software firms can spend as much as 30% of revenue winning customers, by the guests' estimate, while Anthropic spends next to nothing on it, and its research budget has grown more slowly than sales. Existing customers have only raised their spend, and a better Chinese model barely shifts it, which on SemiAnalysis's reading makes a frontier lab arguably a better business than software.
-
2 of 2 current issue
SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel puts next year's US capex tied to AI near $2 trillion, around 5% to 6% of GDP, against the 3.6% shown in a chart comparing it with the railroads.
His count takes in the wider supply chain as well as chips and data centres. He adds that railways and fibre served the country that built them, while American sites both train the models and serve much of the world's inference: most European demand for Anthropic and OpenAI runs on US data centres, and so does much of Asia's.
Odd Lots
Dominik Leusder
Economist and policy analyst, a former researcher at the LSE, who writes the Leusder of Last Resort Substack.
-
1 of 2 contrarian
Dominik Leusder argues the Draghi report's widening US productivity lead is partly a statistical artefact, because the US deflates tech prices for quality gains far more aggressively than Europe does.
The report fixes purchasing-power prices at 2010 levels and carries them forward with each economy's own real growth figures, so any difference in method compounds. Some studies put the extra measured US growth at perhaps 0.2 to 0.3% a year, a wedge that widens whatever happens to output.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
-
2 of 2 contrarian
Dominik Leusder puts US output per hour only slightly above Western Europe's in current purchasing-power terms, and finds the lead disappears once the top 10% of the income distribution is set aside.
The bottom half of Americans fare worse than any European country bar Portugal on his measure, and on actual individual consumption adjusted for hours the US looks unremarkable. Healthcare is the distortion he quantifies: the US spends about 50% more per person than its consumption level predicts, roughly $1.7 to $1.9 trillion a year, mostly on higher prices.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
20VC
Venky GanesanMenlo Ventures
Venky Ganesan is a partner at Menlo Ventures, a three-time Forbes Midas List investor and a former chair of the National Venture Capital Association, with 28 years in venture. His own record includes Palo Alto Networks, Upwork, Poshmark and Rover, and Menlo's portfolio includes Anthropic.
-
1 of 2 framework
Venky Ganesan of Menlo Ventures thinks the AI funding cycle, like most he has known, is likelier to crack at a major debt default than in equity, because equity losses are simply written down while lenders expect to be repaid.
He reads king making, quick successive markups led by strong investors, as Soros's reflexivity: a markup brings capital, attention and hires, which earns the next markup while revenue keeps building underneath. At 4x leverage, he adds, being right is not enough without the timing.
-
2 of 2 explainer
Venky Ganesan of Menlo Ventures expects the next few years to expose accounting creativity at some founders in the AI cycle, arguing that any metric investors put heavy weight on gets gamed, as net revenue retention was in SaaS.
His SaaS example swaps one $100 purchase order for a $10 order and a $50 order a week later, which takes reported retention from 100% to 500%. The AI versions raised on air are contracted revenue that is not yet live and run rates annualised from one best day; his filter is whether founders chase terminal value or the next markup.
Animal Spirits
Sudden Wealth Syndrome | Animal Spirits 485
A two-host episode: Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson, both of Ritholtz Wealth Management, work through the week's markets, rates and private-markets charts.
-
current issue
Animal Spirits sets JPMorgan's record retail rotation into the TLT long-bond ETF against Torsten Slok's longer chart, which shows $75 billion going into ultra-short Treasury ETFs since September 2024 while $5 billion left TLT.
TLT has grown from about $17 billion to almost $50 billion of assets through a drawdown of 40% to 45%, with most of the inflow in 2023 and 2024 and a fresh burst over roughly the past six months. The hosts use the pair to show how a chosen window frames a flow number, with the 30-year yield around 5.7%, its highest in about 20 years.
Monetary Matters
Stacy RasgonBernstein
Stacy Rasgon is managing director and senior analyst covering US semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment at Bernstein, a job he started in April 2008. He holds a PhD in plasma etch and built semiconductor manufacturing equipment before he became an analyst.
-
current issue
Nvidia and Broadcom lagged this year's memory, optics and power trades because investors used them as a stable source of funds for higher-torque bets, by Stacy Rasgon's account.
Money rotated through each new bottleneck in turn, memory, then semicap, networking, optical, power semis and CPUs, as supply tightened and prices rose. Position limits add a mechanical cap: at about $5 trillion, Nvidia is roughly 8% to 9% of the S&P 500, and many of his clients cannot hold more under their single-stock limits.
Alpha Exchange
Chris Hentemann400 Capital Management
Chris Hentemann founded 400 Capital Management in October 2008 with about $2.5 million, mostly his own money, and has built it to roughly $8 billion in asset-based and securitised credit. Before that he ran structured products at Bank of America, after starting at First Boston in 1990 and moving through Salomon Brothers.
-
contrarian
Chris Hentemann says the interlocking credit agreements of the AI build-out, where one company covers another's tail, smell like the contingent risks banks ran in the early 2000s, and that he is slowly moving towards being a second mover.
His worry is support given for reasons tied to some other contingency, often revenue that benefits both parties, which an outside lender may not see before it joins the deal. Straight after 2008 being first carried less risk because events moved fast and left room for error; late in this cycle, in crowded equipment and data-centre finance, he may let others stub their toes and then repeat what works.
Top Traders Unplugged
Alex EdmansLondon Business School
Alex Edmans is professor of finance at London Business School and the author of Grow the Pie, a Financial Times book of the year, and May Contain Lies. He worked at Morgan Stanley before his PhD at MIT, and his study of World Cup results and stock markets was published 20 years ago.
-
explainer
Alex Edmans suggests momentum, documented in 1993, still pays 33 years later because the fund manager's career is undiversified even when the client's portfolio is not.
A study by two academics who also invest for AQR and Goldman Sachs finds momentum tends to underperform when the VIX is high, so some crashes can be seen coming. The ones it misses may be what keep professionals out, because even a strategy that makes money 99% of the time can cost a manager the job in the other 1%.
The Compound and Friends
Jurrien TimmerFidelity Investments
Director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments since 2005, in the firm's global asset allocation group, after earlier roles there as a technical research analyst and portfolio manager of the Fidelity Global Strategies Fund. He has 41 years in the business, 31 of them at Fidelity, where Ned Johnson hired him into the chart room in 1995.
-
explainer
Fidelity's Jurrien Timmer says gold stopped tracking real yields in 2022, when that model pointed to $1,000 and the price doubled instead, and now follows global money supply and central bank buying.
On his model, global M2 of about $120 trillion growing 7% to 9% a year, gold should not have passed $4,800 in 2025, when speculators leaving Bitcoin after its halving-cycle peak took it to about $5,600. The Iran conflict then put reserve assets up for sale and gold traded with Treasuries.
Rational Reminder
Kelly ThomasPWL Capital
Kelly Thomas is an associate wealth adviser at PWL Capital, where Ben Felix is chief investment officer and Dan Bortolotti a portfolio manager; she joins for the opening segment and the leverage discussion that follows.
-
current issue
Morningstar found single-stock leveraged ETF holders more likely to lose over 75% of their money than to beat the stock the fund tracks: 19% of these funds are down more than 75% since launch, while 18% have outperformed.
Swap-based funds carry their financing inside the contract, where the roughly 1% expense ratio never shows it. The research Felix cites finds spreads of about 0.5% over the risk-free rate for 2x index funds, an all-in cost that can exceed 5% a year at current rates, and spreads that can reach nearly 10 percentage points for single stocks, about 12% in total.
In Conversation with Julie Segal
Robert KoenigsbergerGramercy
Founder of Gramercy, which he started in 1998, the year Russia devalued its currency. He began in emerging markets during the less developed country debt crisis and counts almost 40 years in the asset class.
-
1 of 2 contrarian
Robert Koenigsberger says emerging market debt did everything it promised over 25 to 30 years, and investors still lost money by arriving late, buying the index and capitulating.
Over five years the index held assets down 85% and up 150% while the index itself rose perhaps 3% or 4%, which he calls target-rich for active management. Fee pressure pushed institutions into cheap ETFs for a small, unfamiliar allocation, and his answer is that only the net return from the market matters.
-
2 of 2 framework
Robert Koenigsberger says most institutions are moving into local currency emerging market debt a year after its strong run, because their allocation process takes too long.
Buckets exist to contain risk, and he argues their rigidity can add it: an idea spanning silos, such as opportunistic or distressed credit beside a core holding, has no owner. The large state pension funds and sovereign wealth funds he counts as the best investors have built governance that lets them move tactically between dollar, local, investment grade and high yield.
The Real Eisman Playbook
Q3 2026 Market Recap: Energy Up, Utilities Crushed, and Software Flipped | The Weekly Wrap
A solo episode: Steve Eisman's weekly market wrap, recorded on 8 October 2026 for the week ending 9 October.
-
1 of 2 current issue
Steve Eisman counts $140 billion of leveraged loans trading below 80 cents on the dollar, up 90% in a year, with technology 39% of the distressed pool.
Mortgage rates have reached 7.5%, the highest since 2023. Eisman then sets France, with debt at 120% of GDP and rates rising, against a US at 125% that has time France lacks, because the repo market runs on Treasuries and nobody needs to hold French debt.
-
2 of 2 current issue
Steve Eisman shows utilities, down 13% in the third quarter, caught between about $250 billion of AI-driven capex this year and a ratepayer backlash that led Fitch to downgrade the sector's outlook.
Regulators under political pressure to cap bill increases raise the risk that utilities cannot recover the infrastructure spending fully or quickly, while rising long-term rates make their dividends less attractive to the investors who still hold them for safety. NRG Energy, Edison and PG&E each fell more than 25% in the quarter.
The Meb Faber Show
Andrew AngTau Balance
Founder of Tau Balance and a professor at Columbia University, Andrew Ang previously ran factor investing at BlackRock and wrote a widely used graduate finance textbook. By his account, a paper of his in the 2000s helped lay the basis for the low-volatility anomaly.
-
1 of 5 framework
Andrew Ang gives each asset class and each portfolio construction method its own AI agent, and has the agents critique and vote on one another's proposals before a portfolio is set.
Where a human team usually sets every capital market assumption and runs a single mean-variance optimiser, the agents work in parallel and write a plain-English rationale for every call. Ang keeps their disagreement as information and thinks the best opportunities lie where it runs high, while people oversee the workflow through the policy statement and an exception-based framework.
-
2 of 5 explainer
Andrew Ang calculates that federal tax cost a taxable US equity investor about 160 to 170 basis points a year over the last 30 years, which compounds to 36% of the portfolio.
Across 1926 to 2025 the drag averaged about 350 basis points and passed 500 in the 1940s and 1950s, which puts the last three decades at the low end of the century. State taxes, levied on top, are not in the figure.
-
3 of 5 contrarian
Andrew Ang reckons a 10% private credit yield, taxed as income, is worth about 7% in equity terms to a taxable US investor, and that matching a 10% equity return takes a 14% to 15% yield.
Interest and dividends are taxed as they arrive, breaking the compounding that unrealised equity gains keep until sale, and payment-in-kind interest is taxed as income too. Investors get sidetracked by the pre-tax number, he says, and the post-tax one takes some effort to calculate.
-
4 of 5 explainer
Andrew Ang's agents revise their own code and skills in a cycle run by a meta-agent, and every change is logged with its rationale so an investment committee can ratify it like an investment decision.
Agents are graded on whether their expected-return reasoning held up against realised fundamentals as well as on returns, and each rebalance gives a checkpoint. Under a tight policy statement, long-only ETFs near a 60/40 target, the output looks conventional, and Ang concedes he does not know whether it beats a human team and doubts anyone will before live results exist.
-
5 of 5 framework
Andrew Ang diversifies a factor portfolio at three levels, from the signals measuring each factor to the models timing them, and cites value's 2018 to 2020 drawdown, the worst in over a century of data, as the case against relying on one factor.
Value, for instance, is measured with intangible capital and economic value added as well as book-to-market and earnings yield. Tilts come from three models: one weighting past periods that resemble today, factor momentum, and dispersion, where a wide valuation gap between cheap and expensive stocks favours value and a wide return gap between winners and losers favours momentum.
Conversations with Institutional Investors
John PearceUniSuper
John Pearce was chief investment officer of UniSuper when this 2021 conversation was recorded, running a fund of over $100 billion with about 70% managed in-house. He started in the back office of Westpac Investment Management and earlier headed global asset management at Ping An.
-
1 of 4 framework
UniSuper moved most of its money in-house without a stated vision, which John Pearce thought would make a risky change look scarier, and started with a near-passive listed property portfolio.
Pearce borrows Michael Chaney's phrase, logical incrementalism: each step is small enough that a failure does not fall far, so the board and investment committee approve the next one when it makes sense. In reasonably short order that reached billions of dollars of zero-cost currency collars, which he reckons would have worried a few board members had he proposed them on day one.
-
2 of 4 contrarian
UniSuper's John Pearce argued in 2021 that APRA's performance test was flawed because, on a paper he attributed to Frontier, some funds that had consistently beaten their peers failed it while some underperformers passed.
Pearce would have built on the heat map APRA already published: a fund that never reached the second quartile in any year over seven or eight years would have a case to answer, a rule he thought would have sufficed. He said he would not be surprised to see the tests reviewed within a couple of years.
-
3 of 4 framework
UniSuper cornerstoned more than $1 billion of Australian bank hybrids during the European debt crisis, a security John Pearce says many funds allocating by asset-class bucket could not place as either equity or debt.
Pearce traces it to how the team is built: on a large deal it is common to have people from global equities, Australian equities, fixed income and property in one room, and the starting point is that a good investment gets a home. He doubts any other institution owns more hybrids than UniSuper.
-
4 of 4 framework
John Pearce of UniSuper, speaking in 2021, saw a positive in Evergrande as a sign China would let excess clear, and found Beijing's moves on education and tech far more concerning for whether China stays investable.
Pearce asked whether the reset would stay inside sectors Beijing treats as social infrastructure or signal a wider retreat from China's state-based market model; a sector that cannot make money is worth nothing to an offshore owner, however useful at home. He set a Taiwan invasion aside as impossible to build a portfolio around.
Excess Returns
Brent KochubaSpotGamma
Brent Kochuba of SpotGamma, which sells options-flow and dealer-positioning analysis, joins Excess Returns each month ahead of options expiration to read how options hedging is moving the stocks underneath the index. By his account a third of SpotGamma's members are outside the US.
-
current issue
SpotGamma's Kochuba cites SemiAnalysis estimates that a $200-a-month AI plan can consume up to $12,000 of API usage, then shows options repricing the chip trade on the FT's report that OpenAI's annualised revenue is $50 billion against the $70 billion expected.
The report took about 1.5% off the Nasdaq in a day by his recollection, SMH fell 7% from Tuesday to Friday, and Nasdaq call skew dropped sharply from extreme levels. His test for a real turn is skew moving to neutral and then to puts in single stocks, where put buying has been scarce.
Excess Returns
Tom MaherHilton Capital Management
Tom Maher manages Hilton Capital Management's small and mid-cap opportunity strategy, which holds 50 to 75 stocks and takes its size range from the Russell 2500.
-
current issue
Tom Maher of Hilton Capital thinks COVID, tariffs and the Iran war did more than policy to push US companies towards rebuilding industrial capacity at home.
His evidence comes from trucking companies Hilton is involved with, which are seeing more wide loads and heavy-haul work, freight that tends to be industrial equipment, with the improvement starting probably late last year. He keeps the scale modest, some growth rates moving from slightly negative to positive and others a little higher, and counts first-year full depreciation as a further help.
Hidden Forces
Rana Foroohar
Rana Foroohar is the author of Sea Change, America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle, after Makers and Takers, Don't Be Evil and Homecoming, and reported it in part from ten days aboard the US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy in late 2024.
-
current issue
Rana Foroohar says melting ice has opened three ways across the Arctic, and a Chinese shipping company that started its route last month says it cuts 40% off the time of normal routes.
The Northern Sea Route runs mainly through waters Russia claims and is militarising, and China already runs a weekly service on it; the Northwest Passage crosses Canadian waters; a transpolar route over the pole is open for about three weeks a year. Shorter voyages save energy and avoid chokepoints, which is why, she says, everybody is now working out how much more can cross the Arctic.
Insightful Investor
Jeffrey ShermanDoubleLine Capital
Deputy chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, which managed about $97 billion at 30 June 2026.
-
1 of 2 current issue
Jeffrey Sherman says a high-quality bond portfolio of a couple of years' duration could be built to yield 5% to 5.25% in early September, 125 basis points over inflation even if inflation ran at 4%.
Sherman builds it from higher-quality credit: the front end yields about 5%, the belly 5.5% to 5.75%, and 6% to 6.25% for more credit risk in a diversified portfolio. Unstable inflation, on his reading, earns bondholders an inflation premium, which puts the market back where it stood 20 years ago.
-
2 of 2 framework
Jeffrey Sherman says a bond portfolio diversified within one sector at par gets no protection from its winners, because the coupon caps the upside on every holding while the losses can be large.
Equity winners can return ten times over and cover the failures; bonds bought at par cannot, unless they trade cheap on a dollar price. That is Sherman's case against lending to speculative AI companies with no record of doing this, at least at par.
Masters in Business (Ritholtz)
Nitin NohriaHarvard Business School
Former dean of Harvard Business School, where he still teaches and helps oversee its workshops for newly appointed CEOs of very large companies, and executive chairman of Thrive Capital, Joshua Kushner's venture firm. His new book is The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility.
-
framework
Nitin Nohria puts about 15% of the variation in 20 years of company performance down to the CEO, the same share as the industry a company is in and well above what macro shocks explain.
Rate moves and other economy-wide events explain about 5% of the variance and the firm's own assets and position about 25%; once those are controlled for, the CEOs, about three on average over the period, account for 15%. Nohria stresses that the 15% cuts both ways, from long-tenured stars to chiefs fired within three years.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
Bloomberg This Weekend
Abeer Abu Omar, Alex Kokcharov, Herman Chan, Jennifer Lee and Shawn DonnanBloomberg and BMO Capital Markets
Abeer Abu Omar is Bloomberg News's Middle East correspondent and Shawn Donnan a senior economics writer at Bloomberg News. Alex Kokcharov of Bloomberg Economics, Herman Chan of Bloomberg Intelligence and Jennifer Lee, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, cover Ukraine, US bank earnings and US inflation.
-
contrarian
Bloomberg's Shawn Donnan puts foreign holdings of US equities above $24 trillion, up from about $6 trillion in 2016, as evidence the populist turn against globalisation barely shows up in the economy.
US holdings of overseas equities rose in a similar pattern, and goods-trade charts show barely a trace of the populist revolution of a decade ago. Donnan separates the policy retreat in Washington from what companies and consumers actually do, and points to AI: the data centres people object to depend on imported parts, and tariffs have largely been kept off chips and servers.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
AI 5 October 2026 · 47 clips
Training Data (Sequoia)
Amin VahdatGoogle
Amin Vahdat is Google's Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure, named head of its AI infrastructure at the end of last year, at a company the host expects to spend more than $200 billion on capital expenditure this year, most of it on data centres.
-
explainer
Google's Amin Vahdat says Google would rather wait on a utility than build its own gigawatt, because 99.99% reliability from on-site generation means building two gigawatts for every one it needs.
A grid spreads redundancy across many users, so Google plans gigawatt sites with utilities years ahead. In Vahdat's illustration, a utility that can deliver 700 megawatts in the year Google needs a gigawatt leaves a gap that is either waited out or bridged with local generation such as solar and batteries, which can later feed the grid in peak weeks.
ChinaTalk
Bharat PatelAccenture
Accenture's AI and data lead for its defence portfolio, six months out of government. A former enlisted Navy sailor, he worked in Army acquisition from 2007, including at MITRE, was on Project Maven from 2016 and started Project Linchpin, the Army's AI pipeline programme.
-
explainer
Bharat Patel, who started the Army's Project Linchpin, traces Ukraine's drone autonomy to video recorded while humans flew by joystick, a kind of collection he does not see at scale in the US military.
The video the sensors collected was sent back to one place, and only later did teams see they could find targets in it and feed models back into the platforms. US exercises happen, but storing and using their data is resource intensive, so it is usually erased or parked in storage until nobody remembers it is there.
20VC
Dev IttycheriaMongoDB
Dev Ittycheria is chief executive of MongoDB, which he led through its IPO. He started his first company in 1998, and sold BladeLogic to BMC for about $900 million in 2008, a year after its July 2007 listing.
-
1 of 2 current issue
Vercel, at $600 million of annual recurring revenue, now gets 50% of its new business from AI agents choosing it, up from 3% at the start of the year, by 20VC's account.
Agents building software choose the hosting themselves, and the panel finds those choices hard for a person to overrule. Growth the panel recalls as about 170% on roughly 20% more customers puts most of the gain in expansion inside existing accounts.
-
2 of 2 explainer
Two former Groq engineers are suing in Delaware over Nvidia's $17 billion licence-and-hire deal, alleging Groq's board effectively sold its core technology and top staff to Nvidia, leaving common holders with a hollowed-out company.
Delaware treats every holder of the same security alike, while these deals let the buyer steer consideration toward the people it hires; former employees are the likely losers, which points to a small class and a settlement. Buyers accept the risk, on 20VC's reading, because merger review takes months and a licence closes overnight.
a16z
Kevin MandiaArmadin
Kevin Mandia is founder and chief executive of Armadin, which attacks customers' systems with AI to find exploitable vulnerabilities before adversaries do. He has spent 30 years in security and built Mandiant, which he started self-funded in 2004 and which ended up inside Google.
-
framework
Kevin Mandia's rule for running offensive AI agents is to inspect every prompt sent to a frontier model and every response back, and to pause and escalate anything nobody recognises.
In every technical shift of his career defenders have underestimated the top tier of adversary, and he puts the labs' recent surprises down to the same mistake. Hard deterministic limits waste the model's creativity, loose ones leave a grey area, and Armadin fills the gap with classifiers trained on people marking outputs good or bad.
a16z
Matt GarmanAWS
Chief executive of AWS, a business the episode puts at about $169 billion in revenue, growing 37%. He first worked on AWS as a business school intern in 2005, while it was still an internal project.
-
current issue
AWS says it could probably sell every GPU it has to the frontier labs and chooses not to, holding capacity for startups and saying yes in some form to about 60% of requests.
Amazon's capital spending for 2026 is $220 billion, which Garman suggests may be the largest single-year outlay by any company, and he says the binding limit rotates between power, data centres, memory, chips and construction crews. A commitment to buy 2 million Nvidia GPUs over the next couple of years may still fall short.