🇺🇸 United States Episodes

This week’s guest is Will Thorndike, an author and investor whose book The Outsiders is an all-time favorite of mine. Our conversation is in two parts. First, we dive deep into the lessons of his 8-year research project studying CEOs who were master capital allocators. These CEOs include Henry Singleton, John Malone, Tom Murphy, Katherine Graham, and Warren Buffett. We discuss how these CEOs tended to be contrarians on topics like dividends, buybacks, acquisitions, and the use of debt. As we go through each of the tools in the capital allocators toolkit, you’ll hear several useful lessons for running or evaluating a business. In the second part, we cover Will’s career in private equity. Will founded and continues to run Housatonic Partners, investing in buyouts, recaps, and search funds. Will has been one of the most active search fund investors for decades, and given how much time I’ve spent in past episodes on the searchers or operators in the micro-cap, permanent equity space, it was great to get the perspective of an experienced LP. As always, we also take time to survey the dangers and opportunities in today’s private equity market. For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to http://investorfieldguide.com/thorndike For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

No organization that’s entirely closed — or entirely open — can scale as successfully as an organization that combines both. Yes, it invites a bit of chaos – but chaos breeds innovation. Joi Ito has spent his career championing radically open systems, from Creative Commons to cyber currency. As a past director of the famed MIT Media Lab, he focused on facilitating conversations that keep pace with the shifting challenges we face in our companies, institutions and societies. Cameo appearance: Megan Smith (former U.S. Chief Technology Officer).Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rich Benoit is a car enthusiast who salvages Tesla vehicles typically by combining several cars which have been totaled. Check out his YouTube channel Rich Rebuilds: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As companies digitize, they change the way they make decisions: decisions are made lower in the organization, based on data, and increasingly automated. This creates opportunities for startups creating new ways to collect and analyze data to support ...

Hannah Gadsby's groundbreaking special "Nanette" broke comedy. In a talk about truth and purpose, she shares three ideas and three contradictions. (Or not.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oriol Vinyals is a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Before that he was at Google Brain and Berkeley. His research has been cited over 39,000 times. He is one of the most brilliant and impactful minds in the field of deep learning. He is behind some of the biggest papers and ideas in AI, including sequence to sequence learning, audio generation, image captioning, neural machine translation, and reinforcement learning. He is a co-lead (with David Silver) of the AlphaStar project, creating an agent that defeated a top professional at the game of StarCraft. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.

Inside Tracker are a company from Boston MA who provide bloodwork analysis to athletes and the general public. The world is increasingly moving toward a focus on inner health, micro gains and a higher resolution view of our body's internal state. Inside Tracker are at the forefront of this analytical movement. After sitting down with Professor David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School I went straight to meet with Inside Tracker HQ Execs Jonathan Levitt & Carrie Kolb to talk through the trends they're seeing worldwide from thousands of bloodwork samples. Extra Stuff: Inside Tracker - https://www.insidetracker.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philanthropist and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates discusses her new book, “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.” Believing that all lives have equal value, Melinda and her husband, Bill Gates, have donated more than $50 billion to improving equity, health and education in the United States and around the world. Through her work at the foundation over the last 15 years, Melinda has seen firsthand that empowering women and girls can bring transformational improvements in the health and prosperity of families, communities and societies. “How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings?” Melinda asks. “And especially for women because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”

Anthony Jeselnik is a comedian, writer, actor, and producer. His new special "Anthony Jeselnik: Fire in the Maternity Ward" will be available streaming on Netflix on April 30. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe is joined by UFC Light Heavyweight fighter Corey Anderson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

with Jorge Conde (@JorgeCondeBio), Julie Yoo (@julesyoo), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread) Building a software company in healthcare is hard -- and comes along with unique challenges no other entrepreneurs face. In this conversation, a16z bio gene...

Joe is joined by UFC Light Heavyweight fighter Khalil Rountree Jr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Gen Z -- we're all in the workforce together. How are our assumptions about each other holding us back from working and communicating better? Social psychologist Leah Georges shows how we're more similar than different and offers helpful tactics for navigating the multigenerational workplace.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert is known for following her passion, but says she no longer advises others to do the same. Instead, Elizabeth makes the case to follow your curiosity. Elizabeth says she believes the word "passion" can trigger feelings of stress and pressure, and doesn't even know if she believes in following it anymore. “At some point in your life, you were told, ‘Chase your passion,’” she says. “Not everyone knows how to answer that command.”

In the second episode of our APLUSS(Z!) IPO saga, we dive into the history behind the planet’s largest non-social social network, Pinterest. From The Pirates of Silicon Valley to the bloggers of Salt Lake City, the creation story behind this “productivity tool for planning your dreams” is far from your typical unicorn journey. Once labelled as the “next Facebook” by investors and press, ten years later both Pinterest-the-product and Pinterest-the-company are in fact anything but. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing… tune in to find out!Sponsors:WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentryServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredsnMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLCLinksPinterest’s S-1:  https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1506293/000119312519083544/d674330ds1.htmFun photos of the Pinterest early days from Leslie Kincaid:  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/azy9xtxtq5l6r3y/AAC68OhprmVbauZreHPyLbn5a?dl=0Pinterest financial summary on Seeking Alpha: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4255230-know-pinterest-ipoCarve OutsBen: Eugene Wei on the Invest Like The Best Podcast: http://investorfieldguide.com/wei/David: A-Rod interviews George Springer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOqgxmG4yc8

In a story of scientific discovery, chemical biologist David R. Liu shares a breakthrough: his lab's development of base editors that can rewrite DNA. This crucial step in genome editing takes the promise of CRISPR to the next level: if CRISPR proteins are molecular scissors, programmed to cut specific DNA sequences, then base editors are pencils, capable of directly rewriting one DNA letter into another. Learn more about how these molecular machines work -- and their potential to treat or even cure genetic diseases.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marcus Buckingham, head of people and performance research at the ADP Research Institute, and Ashley Goodall, senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco Systems, say that managers and organizations are overestimating the importance of critical feedback. They argue that, in focusing our efforts on correcting weaknesses and rounding people out, we lose the ability to get exceptional performance from them. Instead, we should focus on strengths and push everyone to shine in their own areas. To do that, companies need to rethink the way they review, pay, and promote their employees. Buckingham and Goodall are the authors of the book "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World" and the HBR article "The Feedback Fallacy."

My guest this week is Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital. I had Josh on the podcast last year which was one of the most popular episodes in the shows history. This is a continuation of our ongoing conversation about investing in the frontiers of technology. My favorite thing about Josh and the way that he invests is the mosaic that he and his team at Lux are constantly building to understand the world and where new companies may fit in. We cover a crazy variety of topics from business model innovation, roles of a CEO, the military, the death of privacy, and arrows of human progress. Please enjoy round two with Josh Wolfe. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes 1:22 - (First Question) –Ability to tackle massive scale problems 4:05 – Key roles of leaders and his checklist for evaluating them 5:55 – Common traits among founders that make them incredible storytellers and leaders 10:22 – The concept of ill-liquidity 14:53 – Thoughts on the types of companies going public 16:41 – Most innovative business models 19:14 - Advice for LP’s 23:51 – Common devil             24:01 – The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements 25:09 – Big internal debates at his firm, starting with price discipline 28:45 – The value debate internally 33:34 – CRISPR from an investment standpoint 36:50 – Edge cases they are looking at 46:52 – How they target ideas in a single concept             50:01 – The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage 51:04 – New theses that they chase 56:31 – Recent adventure with special operations guys Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

B-Real is a rapper and actor. He is the lead rapper in the hip hop group Cypress Hill and one of two rappers in the rap rock supergroup Prophets of Rage. Also check out his show "The Smoke Box" on BReal.tv & YouTube. http://breal.tv/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How often do you think about the air you're breathing? Probably not enough, says entrepreneur and TED Fellow Romain Lacombe. He introduces Flow: a personal air-quality tracker that fits in your hand and monitors pollution levels in real time. See how this device could help you track and understand pollution street by street, hour by hour -- and empower you to take action to improve your health.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.