4 January 2025

1/ Shruti Rajagopalan, who hosts the Ideas of India podcast, did an annual retrospective highlighting the podcasts they did in 2024, with her reflections on it. I like this format which was begun by her celebrated fellow Mercatus podcast host Tyler (link for his retro). Link to my highlights.

What I found interesting

  • Books that Shruti thinks are superuseful to unpack the Indian economy: Arvind Panagariya’s India: The Emerging Giant, Tirthankar Roy & Anand Swamy’s Law and the Economy in India: Before Independence and After, Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah’s In Service of the Republic, and Arun Shourie’s Governance
  • Too many young PhDs writing too many RCT (Randomised Controlled Trial) papers and not enough big picture macro / development explorations. This is led by the present incentive architecture of getting your paper into the big 5/10 journals, she says.
  • Under-researched topics in Economics today: Immigration / Migration within India (some of the internal state to state flows are bigger than many country flows she says), Trade, Air Pollution.
  • She is rethinking how much education alone can impact lifetime earnings (especially those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds). Family background matters a lot (Jim Heckman’s research has been an influence)

2/ Ben Hunt (He is @epsilontheory on Twitter) spoke to Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators Podcast. He is Political Science PhD who transitioned into investing. Interesting thinker. The big theme in his work is on narrative crafting, such as how a government shapes the nation’s mood to go to war, or how a stock is positioned as an up and coming one via a narrative. Link to my highlights.

What I found interesting

  • Two stories / narratives – one to explain why something happened, the other to upsell or sell something (related – see Kevin Kwok’s Narrative Distillation)
  • Two questions to ask: ‘what is your best guess’ and ‘how sure are you’. Not enough focus on the second he says quoting his mentor Gary King. Remember reading (Stanley Druckenmiller perhaps) that picking alone is not enough, and you need to size your bets too. In that regard, how sure are you matters. That determines how big and deep you can go.
  • Keynesian beauty contest. Interesting mental model.  To think of this in venture terms, where a seed investor invests in a firm over another because he thinks Series A firms will think it is attractive.

3/ Russell Napier is an independent macro analyst, and author. This was a very interesting interview – one that really is perspective shifting. He says we are entering an era of national capitalism, where the government will (akin to how China works) have a say in capital flows and where they are directed to. He says the monetary system is shifting to a new phase, where governments will inflate away debt. He recommends shifting away from debt and S&P500 and looking at equity that could benefit from the capex wave.

Link to my highlights.

4/ Terrific article by Christopher Pedregal of Granola on how to build exceptional AI products. Very provocative intro – “The traditional laws of startup physics — like solving the biggest pain points first or that supporting users gets cheaper at scale—don’t fully apply here. And if your intuitions were trained on regular startup physics, you’ll need to develop some new ones in AI.”

Don’t entirely agree but there is some truth that you shouldn’t rush to solve the biggest painpoint now (if improving LLMs remove that painpoint, that is a lot of effort gone) but instead focus on enhancing context (which improves the AI-generated output) and the experience (which is not necessarily AI). It is a bit like airlines (dont worry abt the 747 or 320) but on what the customer can do with it to get their work done (reach their destination in comfort). Link to my highlights.

5/ Thanks to the Conversations with Tyler retro, I read the transcript for his podcast episode with historian Alan Taylor. Enjoyable one that. Alan Taylor knows his field (US Revolutionary War and 18-19th century North American history) really well, and that came through. There is a 2 page segment where he talks about how he is seeing dropping interest from students for history, primarily due to the declining prospects for employment – reduced tenure track roles, limited openings in Industry for historians in contrast with say Economics students etc.) Even as demand for academic history declines, we are seeing a huge demand for popular history, especially podcasts like ‘The Rest is History’ / Hardcore History etc. This Bloomberg piece captures the rise of the history podcast.