Brian Kearney

Insto Investor's CLIPDESK

8 November 2026

112 new episodes (99 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 40 highlight clips below (118 mins total).

Investment 8 November 2026 · 40 clips

20VC

Scott WilsonWashU

Chief investment officer of WashU's endowment, which was just under $8 billion when he started and is now a managed pool of just under $20 billion. Over his nine years it has made about $17 billion of profit and paid about $5 billion to the university.

Hosted by

Harry Stebbings

7 November 2026 · 57m 17s · 3 clips below

  1. 1 of 3 framework

    WashU would probably target 70 to 80% of its endowment in private markets if it had no payout to fund, against a broad target of half today.

    Wilson's constraint is that distributions to the university can only come from liquid assets, and a 5% draw on a portfolio that is 50% liquid takes 10% of the liquid book each year. Over the last decade its privates probably compounded in the low to mid 20s, he says, against about 10% for its public equities, and he tells his board the two differ mainly in how often they are marked.

    2m 42s · from 4:55

  2. 2 of 3 framework

    WashU held more than 20% of its endowment in SpaceX at one point, under single-name limits that apply at cost.

    Wilson says a new commitment above 2 or 3% of the portfolio in one company goes to the board, with approval needed at what he thinks is 4%, and the team argued to keep the position through several continuation vehicles and the IPO. He calls the 10% per-company caps in venture funds mostly artificial: a fund that is 2% of the portfolio with half its capital in one company is a 1% exposure for the LP.

    1m 55s · from 10:34

  3. 3 of 3 framework

    WashU says its endowment would have sat at the peer-group average over the last decade without its direct and co-investments, which put it at or near the top.

    Wilson's team are all generalists and spend 80 to 90% of their time meeting companies. The ideas still start with the managers WashU backs: the team starts from a company a partner it already backs likes, verifies the thesis itself, and treats some partners as higher signal than others.

    1m 40s · from 8:45

Capital Allocators

Scott RamsowerTeacher Retirement System of Texas

Head of private equity funds at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, where a 27-person team manages $33 billion of private equity inside a $250 billion pension plan; he joined 16 years ago, when the programme was six people and $7 billion, after starting his LP career at AlpInvest, and chairs the board of ILPA.

Hosted by

Ted Seides

6 November 2026 · 48m 07s · 3 clips below

  1. 1 of 3 contrarian

    Scott Ramsower finds most continuation vehicles underwritten to at least another 2x, so an asset sold out of a fund at 5x would have been a 10x deal had it stayed.

    He says capturing that right tail is why LPs own private equity at all, and CVs move the best assets out just before it arrives. Across the industry, with LPs selling more than they roll, he says CVs could put downward pressure on fund returns, because the winners finish their run in standalone vehicles most original investors do not hold.

    1m 38s · from 25:03

  2. 2 of 3 current issue

    Scott Ramsower cites a survey this summer in which 54% of LPs expect more zombie funds in their portfolios in two years, against 28% two years ago.

    He traces it to the 2018 to 2022 vintages, which bought in a low-rate, high-multiple market that no longer exists. CVs can help a single asset or a single GP but cannot absorb the backlog, and a GP collecting fees on NAV or cost, and perhaps out of the carry, has little reason to force a sale; the LP's exit is the secondary market at a deep discount.

    2m 40s · from 29:27

  3. 3 of 3 framework

    Texas Teachers strips continuation-vehicle sales out of a GP's track record and shows its investment committee a 'synthetic DPI' beside the reported figure.

    Ramsower's reason is that a sale into a CV books DPI and IRR for the old fund while the same GP still manages the asset. He also finds no CV record can satisfy his committee: strong results suggest the asset was sold too cheaply, weak ones suggest poor judgement, and that two-sided pressure should keep CV returns as a class from straying far either way.

    2m 45s · from 19:10

Excess Returns

Bob Elliott and Aahan MenonUnlimited and Prometheus Research

Bob Elliott is co-founder, chief executive and chief investment officer of Unlimited; Aahan Menon is founder of Prometheus Research. Elliott says his work on the 2006 to 2008 housing cycle put the losses facing financial institutions in the trillions about 18 months before markets recognised them.

Hosted by

Matt Zeigler

5 November 2026 · 55m 30s · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 contrarian

    Bob Elliott says US banks have gone from about 30 times leverage to 8, one reason he sees no risk of a 2008-style credit event.

    Much of the lending now runs at about 50% loan-to-value through unlevered or lightly levered lenders such as pension funds and private credit funds, which he says is why commercial property losses have run at 20 to 30 basis points for three or four years since SVB. Almost all of it could lose half its value without ruining anyone, which makes it behave more like equity.

    2m 48s · from 45:25

  2. 2 of 2 current issue

    Bob Elliott puts US nominal household spending growth at 6% to 8% against wage growth near 3% to 3.5%, a gap households have filled by running down savings since early 2025.

    In 2023 and 2024 spending and income both grew about 6%, which is why he rejected the recession calls of 2022; since then the gap has widened, and real consumer spending in September was flat. On his account dissaving holds up only while asset prices keep rising, and stocks and retirement balances have been flat for six months, with house prices flat to down in sensitive areas.

    3m 01s · from 13:23

The Meb Faber Show

Albert EdwardsSociété Générale

Global strategist at Société Générale, in the same sell-side job for about 44 years by his own account. His Ice Age thesis, put together in 1996, held that Western bond yields would follow Japan's toward zero, and he says it served him for about 20 years.

Hosted by

Meb Faber

6 November 2026 · 53m 22s · 3 clips below

  1. 1 of 3 framework

    Albert Edwards says the stock-bond correlation has flipped back to positive, as he forecast before COVID, so higher bond yields now mean lower equity prices.

    He ties the sign of the correlation to inflation: below 2%, as in Japan after 1990, falling yields signalled deflation and equities de-rated as bonds rallied, the basis of his 1996 Ice Age thesis. Bloomberg's Simon White puts the switch at around 5% yields, and above it, with inflation over 2%, bonds stop offsetting equity losses and both fall together.

    2m 43s · from 9:45

  2. 2 of 3 contrarian

    US total factor productivity growth is below zero, down from about 3% 18 months ago, while output per worker grows above 3%, on a chart from Apollo's Torsten Slok that Albert Edwards cites.

    Edwards reads the gap the way Paul Krugman read the East Asian miracle in 1995: growth bought by pouring in capital, with little return on it. With market breadth narrowed to a few AI names, he sees an investment boom whose return on capital is not arriving, and a liquidity squeeze that may end it before the returns can.

    4m 22s · from 35:21

  3. 3 of 3 contrarian

    Albert Edwards says US companies are again raising prices faster than their costs and widening margins, as they did in 2022.

    Last time, he says, unit costs and unit profits rose together for the first time he could find in US data; now oil has lifted non-labour unit costs about 10%, productivity above 3% holds unit labour costs near zero, and profit per unit is climbing anyway. His conclusion is that rate-setters need about 200 basis points quickly, and that a 100 basis point jump in yields would end the equity rally before the AI profit cycle turns.

    4m 37s · from 20:47

Money Maze Podcast

Heather TobinCPP Investments

Senior managing director and global head of capital markets and factor investing at CPP Investments, which manages nearly $900 billion for the Canada Pension Plan and holds about 80 external hedge fund relationships across roughly 12 strategy types. She has been at CPP for 17 years and, before her current role, ran the team that allocates the fund's whole active portfolio.

Hosted by

Simon Brewer

5 November 2026 · 43m 31s · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 current issue

    CPP Investments puts the big multi-manager platforms at roughly 10% to 15% of hedge fund assets, taking a much larger share of new money and talent.

    Tobin says platforms pass data, technology and pay costs straight through to investors, so CPP judges them on the share of gross alpha it pays away and looks for management and staff invested on the same cost structure. The best managers are closing or capping capacity, which makes it harder for CPP to keep growing its programme.

    3m 34s · from 11:14

  2. 2 of 2 current issue

    CPP Investments says the best hedge fund managers and the big platforms are looking for longer liquidity terms than the usual quarterly dealing with 25% gates.

    Tobin says they want time to invest in talent, technology and systems, and CPP can extend its capital where it judges the longer duration justifies the potential for a higher net return. It has held some managers for close to two decades and still redeems a meaningful part of the book every year.

    3m 38s · from 29:34

The Compound and Friends

Dan CliftonBaird Strategas

Partner and head of policy research at Baird Strategas, studying how elections, trade, tax, healthcare and energy policy move the economy and markets; his Washington team has been ranked among Wall Street's top policy research teams for 18 consecutive years.

Hosted by

Josh Brown and Michael Batnick

6 November 2026 · 1h 11m · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 current issue

    Dan Clifton counts 40 data-centre measures on the midterm ballot, and 38 went against the industry.

    Clifton says most cancellations come from local opposition, and that governors now matter more than Congress: Ohio, Georgia and Texas hold about 40% of the build. In Virginia a $600 million tax increase in June saw Blackstone pull the state's largest project within two days and Amazon later cancel four zoned sites, and he dates the relative peak in data-centre stocks to that week, when Texas, the state meant to take every other state's spillover, turned too.

    3m 42s · from 21:59

  2. 2 of 2 prediction

    Dan Clifton expects the new Congress to end up with a global price on Medicaid drugs within about six months, a far smaller hit to big pharma than a Medicare version.

    His sequence starts with an ambition bill, reported around Thanksgiving, with 50 price cram-downs a year and the orphan-drug exclusion removed, which he says will scare generalists crowded into large-cap pharma and never become law. Democrats then trade pieces of it for Iran war funding, pharma lobbies to shift the cut onto Medicaid, and both Trump and Elizabeth Warren want that version.

    2m 19s · from 1:02:29

Invest Like the Best

Ramtin NaimiAbstract Ventures

Founder and managing partner of Abstract Ventures, which raised a $100 million first fund in 2018 and has just closed an $800 million fund. He has invested at the early stage since 2016.

Hosted by

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

6 November 2026 · 49m 37s · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 current issue

    Ramtin Naimi of Abstract Ventures says venture LPs' liquidity now hangs on three or four companies, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks, and those without them have had almost nothing back.

    Upstream, he says, the mega platform funds have deployed about three times faster than their 18 to 24 month plans, because there are more companies to back, each costs more, and the modelled ownership takes more money. Each must now choose between ownership with fewer shots on goal or the same count at lower stakes, while managers whose investors lack the big names hunt for new capital.

    3m 51s · from 9:49

  2. 2 of 2 contrarian

    Ramtin Naimi says buying the obvious venture winners at top prices has become a consensus strategy, and he cannot think of an easy strategy at this scale that went on to pay.

    Bought at $100 billion in 2021 and valued at $179 billion now, Stripe is on Naimi's figures an 11% to 12% annual return, ahead of three quarters of venture funds. His worry is the record number of firms in the last 18 months raising large funds on access to the same handful of companies.

    2m 40s · from 34:18

Excess Returns

Brent Kochuba, Ben Hunt, Aahan Menon and Eric PachmanSpotGamma, Perscient, Prometheus Research and Data 4 The People

Brent Kochuba of SpotGamma reads options positioning; Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory and Perscient tracks market narratives; Aahan Menon of Prometheus Research runs a systematic macro process. Eric Pachman of Data 4 The People worked as a refinery engineer and in the investment business before building free public inflation and energy datasets.

Hosted by

Matt Zeigler and Jack Forehand

7 November 2026 · 1h 15m · 1 clip below

  1. explainer

    Eric Pachman puts tanker day rates at up to about $1.2 to 1.3 million, against a normal $20,000 to $30,000.

    Crossing Hormuz now takes a shuttle ship on the dangerous leg handing its cargo to a second, which halves the fleet available on that route, and rerouted voyages take 40 days where they took 20. Pachman's conclusion is that a peace deal would not restore supply quickly, because the ships are the constraint.

    3m 45s · from 59:09

Excess Returns

Mike GreenTier1 Alpha Asset Management

Founder and chief executive of Tier1 Alpha Asset Management, which tracks flows across about 4,000 ETFs and funds and has two ETFs in filing. He has worked on passive investing's effect on prices for more than ten years.

Hosted by

Matt Zeigler and Justin Carbonneau

6 November 2026 · 55m 12s · 1 clip below

  1. contrarian

    Mike Green says giant IPOs such as SpaceX now complete while small ones fail, because index rules turn benchmark funds into buyers of low-float new listings.

    On his account the providers overweight thin floats, so trillions of indexed capital have to buy an inclusion whatever anyone thinks of the AI story; he allows that his reading could be wrong.

    2m 15s · from 3:29

The Real Eisman Playbook

The AI Narrative Shifts Again: Midterms, Data Centers, and a Market Correction | The Weekly Wrap

A solo episode: Steve Eisman's weekly wrap of markets and earnings, recorded on Thursday 5 November 2026.

Hosted by

Steve Eisman

6 November 2026 · 31m 16s · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    Steve Eisman says Google's search revenue grew 12% last quarter against 19% in the first quarter of 2026, and reads the slowdown as AI answers starting to replace search.

    On Eisman's account a capital-light search business with a deep moat is giving way to AI answers that need heavy spending on data centres and models and hold users loosely, because switching between language models looks cheap. He says the replacement is slow, and under way.

    1m 23s · from 10:11

Monetary Matters

Russell ClarkBrumby Capital

Russell Clark founded Brumby Capital, a London-based hedge fund, and writes a Substack on markets. The host knows him as a short seller, and he counts a Chinese industrial overbuild among the two best shorts of his career.

Hosted by

Max Wiethe

5 November 2026 · 56m 06s · 3 clips below

  1. 1 of 3 framework

    Russell Clark's best shorts came from industries that overbuilt for a logical reason, such as Chinese producers racing to be biggest so the state picks them to consolidate.

    Clark says most short theses start by assuming management are idiots or frauds, and calls that a terrible place to begin against companies run by Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk. In Chinese industry the government normally hands consolidation to the market-share leader, so every producer overbuilds to be number one, and once that incentive is understood the cycle is relatively easy to read.

    1m 47s · from 9:43

  2. 2 of 3 contrarian

    Russell Clark treats oil as close to a dead commodity, with road fuel demand topping out in China at far lower levels than in Europe or the US.

    He points to US shale rigs rising since the Iran war, long-dated US natural gas futures falling, and refineries no longer built because their end value is too low. On his account wages are the structural driver of inflation, so each time the Fed cuts on a lower oil price the long end of the bond market sells off.

    2m 43s · from 52:49

  3. 3 of 3 framework

    Russell Clark argues the reserve pools built since the 1980s, which fed Treasuries and private equity alike, are shrinking as China and Japan cut their Treasury holdings.

    Those pools existed because exporters held their currencies down to keep wages competitive; governments now push real wages up, which takes spending and higher rates to defend the currency, so the capital alternative managers raised from is shrinking. Meanwhile AI borrowers pull liquidity from other credit, with SoftBank paying 7 to 8% for three-year money in Europe and Japan.

    3m 27s · from 22:44

Merryn Talks Money

Bad News Is Good News — Until It Isn’t

The weekly markets wrap from Bloomberg's Merryn Talks Money, presented by its two hosts without a guest.

Hosted by

Merryn Somerset Webb and John Stepek

6 November 2026 · 19m 36s · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    Panmure Liberum finds takeover bids removed a larger share of UK small-cap market value this year than in any year since its records began in 2001.

    The presenters put the small-cap index, excluding investment trusts, at fewer than 100 companies against 460 thirty years ago, about 11 lost a year with too few listings to replace them. They blame MiFID research unbundling, which left smaller companies without broker coverage, along with private equity, which lets a business grow for years without listing.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    2m 09s · from 6:59

Odd Lots

James BosworthStimson Center

Non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and author of the Latin America Risk Report newsletter, who forecasts the region's elections with stated probabilities.

Hosted by

Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway

5 November 2026 · 32m 20s · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    James Bosworth says the oil majors beyond Chevron will not commit to Venezuela until their contracts carry rule-of-law certainty, leaving the field to small operators chasing quick deals.

    Bosworth's reasoning is that 10- and 30-year investments cannot be committed against terms that may change when the government does, and that firms without serious drilling records elsewhere cannot rebuild Venezuelan output. Exxon and Conoco, expelled in the Chávez era, are interested; on his account that makes a democratic transition a precondition of the oil recovery.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    1m 38s · from 22:05

Odd Lots

Skanda AmarnathEmploy America

Executive director of Employ America and an Odd Lots regular.

Hosted by

Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway

6 November 2026 · 37m 13s · 1 clip below

  1. prediction

    Skanda Amarnath of Employ America says US inflation might stay around 3% a lot longer than is now expected, with three of its drivers still working through.

    Hot services prices, on his reading, come from airfares tracking jet fuel after the Strait of Hormuz closure and refining capacity problems, and not necessarily from wages; diesel costs have yet to show up in food services prices, which do feed core. Memory-chip price rises may prove durable, and cars, along with some Canadian tariffs, have not yet passed through to consumers.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    2m 04s · from 28:33

Masters in Business (Ritholtz)

Ann BerryThreadneedle

Founder and managing partner of Threadneedle, which provides capital and advice to companies from seed stage to mature businesses. She spent nearly 12 years at Goldman Sachs in M&A and private equity, then became a partner at Cornell Capital and ran its portfolio company PureStar, an outsourced hotel laundry business, through the pandemic.

Hosted by

Barry Ritholtz

6 November 2026 · 1h 13m · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    Ann Berry says the big tech chief executives and finance chiefs she interviews list fit, team and culture as acquisition criteria and do not mention price until she asks.

    Berry reads it as companies once known for return discipline deciding that being in the game matters more than what they pay to be in it. She extends it to corporate venture: Nvidia, Salesforce and others have billions at cost in startups, the FT covered how much of last earnings season's profit came from marking such stakes up, and the stakes double as a pipeline of future targets.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    3m 21s · from 56:43

Capital Allocators

Vik UppalMavik Capital Management

Founder and CIO of Mavik Capital Management, a special situations firm in commercial real estate and hard assets that he built after buying Terra Capital Partners in 2018. Within two years of starting as an intern at Mount Kellett he was co-head of its US real estate investments, about 25% of that firm's capital.

Hosted by

Ted Seides

6 November 2026 · 1h 5m · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 current issue

    Mavik Capital did not do a deal for almost a year after closing its first special opportunities fund in April 2023.

    Uppal's investor letter right after the close scored deal flow 5 out of 10, against the 9 or 10 most managers claim, and he credits the pause to paying nobody at the firm on deals closed. Pay tied to volume, on his account, would have pushed the team into deals in a market it did not rate.

    1m 31s · from 32:42

  2. 2 of 2 contrarian

    Mavik Capital has not done a single data centre or AI infrastructure deal, because Vik Uppal says he cannot put a long-term value on the assets with high confidence.

    Uppal expects demand to grow as it did for the internet, perhaps beyond forecast, and still points to the dark fibre later sold for pennies on the dollar, adding a high chance that the technology itself becomes far more efficient. Money is pouring in, on his account, because managers can raise it.

    3m 02s · from 46:43

20VC

Jason Lemkin, 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.

Hosted by

Harry Stebbings

5 November 2026 · 1h 8m · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    20VC's panel reports that large software acquirers want at least $100 million of revenue before they buy, because anything smaller cannot carry their sales machine.

    Cresta, with well over $200 million of ARR, and Listen Labs, with $20 million, sold for relatively similar prices, about ten times revenue for Cresta and a far higher multiple for Listen Labs. The panel says buyers privately rank small technology bets as their worst-performing deals, and describes Salesforce's run of purchases as each senior executive's best idea funded like a chip at the table, some expected to fail.

    4m 05s · from 1:04:04

The Credit Edge

Scott BaskindInvesco

Scott Baskind is global private credit chief investment officer at Invesco, whose private credit platform runs more than $45 billion across syndicated loans, CLOs, direct lending and opportunistic credit.

Hosted by

James Crombie and Matthew Geudtner

5 November 2026 · 49m 08s · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 current issue

    Invesco's Scott Baskind thinks the private credit premium over public high yield and leveraged loans is probably at the tight end of its usual 150 to 250 basis points, after public spreads widened.

    Baskind expects it back near 200 as issuance normalises in the fourth quarter. Invesco lends at SOFR plus 475 to 575, mid-range by his history, against 600-plus and overall yields above 12% in 2023, and he benchmarks against single-B and double-B paper because the broad high-yield and loan indices carry triple-C stress.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    4m 24s · from 6:16

  2. 2 of 2 current issue

    Invesco's Scott Baskind puts CLOs at probably more than 70% of demand for leveraged loans, up from about half before the financial crisis.

    Baskind presents that concentration as strength: the vehicle lets investors choose their risk from triple-A notes down to equity, and its floating-rate notes now compete with cash and investment-grade corporate bonds for allocations. He expects CLOs to keep growing with US and European borrowers.

    Audio streamed from the publisher.

    2m 21s · from 34:17

Top Traders Unplugged

Suhaimi Zainul-AbidinQuantedge

Chief executive of Quantedge, a Singapore systematic firm founded in 2006 that has grown from about $3 million to close to $8 billion across close to 300 markets. He joined as general counsel in 2012 to 2013 and became chief executive in 2018.

Hosted by

Moritz Seibert

6 November 2026 · 51m 39s · 2 clips below

  1. 1 of 2 framework

    Quantedge requires every investor to lock up for at least three years, so a large holder's panic in a drawdown cannot force the fund to trade.

    Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin says investors who promise to sit through a 20 to 30% fall still get nervous when it arrives, and with close to a thousand holders the firm can no longer know each one. Most assets sit in semi-perpetual and perpetual classes; the semi-perpetual class can redeem up to 5% of shares each quarter, so the balance never reaches zero and holders think of it much like an endowment.

    3m 20s · from 37:16

  2. 2 of 2 framework

    Quantedge runs its fund at about 25% volatility, spending the risk its diversification removes on more leverage instead of a smoother ride.

    Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin's case is that each uncorrelated strategy added drives portfolio risk down and, left alone, leaves return on the table, while volatility is not the most damaging measure of risk; he thinks 25% probably keeps a healthy distance from a catastrophic loss. Sizing now runs on total risk, adding correlations, tail risk, liquidity and margin requirements, with margin at around 30 to 40% of equity in normal markets.

    4m 52s · from 20:04

Top Traders Unplugged

Cem Karsan

A co-host of the Systematic Investor series who runs volatility strategies and builds portfolios on the wealth side of his business.

Hosted by

Niels Kaastrup-Larsen

7 November 2026 · 1h 4m · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    Cem Karsan says the dispersion trade became so expensive this year that many managers who run it have stepped away.

    He ties it loosely to the October stress at multi-strategy funds: long-short equity books have grown to a size where liquidity, with index volatility held down, pushes single stocks apart. After two flow-driven days following the blue wave, he says two good days in volatility can make up for six months of poor performance.

    2m 53s · from 5:36

AI 8 November 2026 · 40 clips

All-In

Midterm Blood Bath, $4T AI Sell Off, Data Center Freeze, What’s Next for Trump

Hosted by

Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks and David Friedberg

7 November 2026 · 1h 33m · 1 clip below

  1. framework

    Chamath Palihapitiya expects a slowdown in US data-centre approvals to hand pricing power to the hyperscalers that already own capacity, at the expense of the neoclouds and model labs that rent it.

    On his account an owner can keep renting as now, or keep new capacity for its own models so Gemini catches up while Anthropic and OpenAI, improving on a 60 to 90 day cycle, pay more for less. He picks out one contract: SpaceX and Anthropic can each end their compute deal on 90 days' notice, which he says could let SpaceX reprice at a spot rate put at perhaps two to three times the market rate.

    4m 50s · from 56:28

Excess Returns

Mike GreenTier1 Alpha Asset Management

Founder and chief executive of Tier1 Alpha Asset Management, which tracks flows across about 4,000 ETFs and funds and has two ETFs in filing. He has worked on passive investing's effect on prices for more than ten years.

Hosted by

Matt Zeigler and Justin Carbonneau

6 November 2026 · 55m 12s · 1 clip below

  1. contrarian

    Mike Green expects the cost of AI access to collapse the way bandwidth did after the fibre build-out, which bankrupted business models priced on scarcity.

    His example is Cogent Communications, which he says carries about 27% of global internet traffic on a $400 million market value, built on equipment bought out of bankruptcy and a perpetual $1,000-a-month lease on one fibre from a distressed Level 3. The exception he allows is a state that treats the labs as a security asset and props up their monopolies.

    2m 57s · from 31:51

20VC

Jason Lemkin, 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.

Hosted by

Harry Stebbings

5 November 2026 · 1h 8m · 1 clip below

  1. framework

    20VC's panel argues that venture money forces AI products to launch about 12 months before their unit economics work, because a funded rival will otherwise take the market first.

    The bet, on the panel's account, is that digital costs fall 50% to 60% a year, so a product people get hooked on grows into its margins, as Facebook's early server bill did. Who survives the wait depends on the funder: a $10 monthly subsidy costs $100 million a year per million users, which a company spending $70 billion on capex barely notices and a venture-backed one cannot carry for long.

    3m 37s · from 21:16

Latent Space

Jay ParikhMicrosoft

Executive vice president of CoreAI at Microsoft, interviewed after his GitHub Universe keynote; GitHub has 225 million developers and handled 34.3 billion commits over the past year. He previously led engineering at Facebook and was chief executive of Lacework.

Hosted by

Latent Space

8 November 2026 · 23m 15s · 1 clip below

  1. current issue

    Microsoft's Jay Parikh says Fortune 500 buyers of coding agents now want limits and governance on their token spending, and evidence the money bought something.

    GitHub's answer is to report spend by use case and suggest a cheaper model where one would serve. The conversation then works out the yardstick: revenue is too far from an engineer's desk, so the measures settle on features shipped, cost saved, engagement, retention and customer satisfaction.

    1m 42s · from 20:51

Latent Space

Jamin BallAltimeter

Partner at Altimeter and author of Clouded Judgement, a weekly newsletter on public software metrics and valuation multiples that he has written for six and a half years and puts at probably close to 100,000 subscribers. Altimeter holds a large position in Anthropic, which he disclosed at the start of the conversation.

Hosted by

swyx

7 November 2026 · 1h 42m · 1 clip below

  1. framework

    Jamin Ball argues an AI lab has to build a machine that turns out a frontier model every year, as Nvidia's lead comes from its process for making chips more than from any single chip.

    The depreciation worry, a billion-dollar model that earns for six months, is answered only as long as each run beats the last, and a failed run briefly set OpenAI back. Ball passes on a view he hears from other investors that a lab more than an order of magnitude short of the leaders' compute cannot compete, and if Anthropic stopped, OpenAI and Google's Gemini would keep shipping.

    3m 27s · from 52:04

Worth listening to in full 8 November 2026

Most clips above stand alone. These are the episodes that justify the whole hour.

A 50% Stock Market Crash Could Be Possible - Albert Edwards Explains Why

The Meb Faber Show · 53m 22s

One argument holds the whole 53 minutes: liquidity and bond yields will decide when this market breaks, and Edwards backs each link (de-rating, the correlation flip, greedflation, China's credit impulse, capital productivity, refining margins) with a figure or a chart a reader can check. The opening and closing are short and the host keeps the questions on the argument.

Inside WashU's Endowment Fund | Why China & Europe Has So Much Opportunity | Scott Wilson

20VC · 57m 17s

Fifty-seven minutes with the CIO of a nearly $20 billion endowment setting out one model end to end, with a number at each step: a payout met only from liquid assets, directs as the whole of the excess return, single-name limits at cost, valuation discipline as the reason managers are dropped, and the costliest mistake priced in billions. The stretches between the clips (holding and hedging distributed stock, walking away from Sequoia's evergreen structure, Europe and China) carry the same argument.

Scott Ramsower: The $100 to $300 Cost-Basis Math GPs Get Wrong

Capital Allocators · 48m 07s

Ramsower holds one argument for most of 48 minutes: the LP's reading of continuation vehicles, taken point by point with the arithmetic shown, then carried into zombie funds, retail vehicles and how Texas Teachers now underwrites managers. The opening six minutes of biography and the closing personal questions can be skipped; everything between is a working session on private equity liquidity that an allocator would use.

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