I’m heading to a Morgan Wallen concert this weekend at the Big House with over 100,000 fans. Between this, the recent World Cup games, and the flocks watching the Odyssey in theaters, I find myself grateful for the shared experiences that weren’t possible just a handful of years ago.

Here are the podcasts you’ll want to rock out to this weekend.

An American Is Running Mexico’s Biggest Cartel

Julian Dorey Daily · Ed Calderon · 1h 5m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

The man now believed to be running the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, reportedly the biggest, best armed criminal organization in the country, grew up in Santa Ana, California. He’s an American citizen, son-in-law of the recently killed cartel boss known as El Mencho, and he inherited the job the way you’d inherit a family business.

What elevates this past shock value is how this episode reframes the whole US-Mexico story. Forget invasion talk, the real American intervention already happened quietly: drones mapping cartel supply lines for months before a wave of targeted killings, CIA officers dead after a Mexican drug raid, eleven politicians facing US charges while the country’s president claims she still needs proof.

It’s a mass extinction event for the old cartel kingpin model, and the story that sticks, a kidnapped money launderer forced to watch his ten year old son tortured over a debt, tells you exactly how much darker the replacement looks.

Zohran Mamdani in His Own Words

The Daily · Zohran Mamdani · 1h 6m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani makes his case less with rhetoric than arithmetic:

• 170,000 potholes filled

• The lowest murder and shooting totals in city history

• $334,000 - what a family now needs to earn just to afford care for a single two year old

What elevates this past the usual mayoral profile is a small scene he describes from a campaign walk through one of the poorest congressional districts in the country: a man leaving a bodega with two packs of diapers, while billions in federal money flow past that same block toward the Israeli military.

Zohran uses the image to argue about where political capital should actually go, and whatever you think of the politics, the discipline of turning a walk through a neighborhood into a policy argument is worth hearing him do himself.

The Iran Escalation Trap

The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett · Robert Pape · 1h 41m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Robert Pape has spent twenty years modeling what happens when the US bombs Iran, and the reason to listen now is that his predictions keep landing.

The University of Chicago political scientist argues the US is now stuck in what he calls the escalation trap, a fork where the only way out is either owning a public defeat or crossing into ground operations, which he puts at seventy percent odds within a month.

What sticks is his explanation of suicide terrorism risk: it isn’t bombing that triggers it, he says, it’s ground troops occupying territory, which is exactly the option now on the table.

Pape keeps circling back to Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam tapes, a president who knew escalation probably wouldn’t work but couldn’t stomach owning the loss. If you want the actual mechanics of how a president talks himself into a war he doesn’t think he can win, this is it.

The Whistleblower Who Found Lutnick in the Epstein Files

Global News Podcast · Andy Verity · 28m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

A BBC investigation traces how a broken Wall Street whistleblower stumbled onto proof that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was still doing business with Epstein years after he claimed he'd cut him off, with a British prince tangled in the middle.

AI Optimism Gap

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Selina Xu · 46m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Selina Xu, who researches China’s AI industry for Eric Schmidt, explains why 84% of Chinese people are excited about AI versus about 10% of Americans, and it has more to do with anime boyfriends than propaganda.

From $750 Etsy Shop to a $50M Wellness Brand

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha · Luna Aziz · 1h 15m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Luna Aziz didn’t set out to build anything. She was a new mom whose milk supply wouldn’t cooperate, and after a lactation consultant shrugged and pointed her toward fenugreek (which nearly dropped her blood sugar low enough to send her to the floor), she bought a coffee grinder and a pill encapsulator off eBay for about a hundred bucks and started dosing herself with herbs from Middle Eastern, Indian, and South American traditions until she landed on formulas that worked.

She posted them on Etsy as a hobby and woke up to fifty overnight orders after one mom raved about them in a Facebook group of twenty thousand. Ten years later that hobby is Legendairy Milk, a bootstrapped, no investor company that controls something like seventy percent of the lactation supplement market.

What sticks with me is the customer service detail: every rep gets ninety hours of lactation training and isn’t allowed to mention a product until they’ve actually tried to help the mom for free.

The Making of Toast

How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aman Narang · 1 hr · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Aman Narang’s first idea for Toast was small and obvious: an app to pay your restaurant bill from your phone so you didn’t have to flag down a server. It flopped, and the flop is the interesting part.

Digging into why nobody wanted it, he and his cofounders discovered restaurants were running on point of sale systems so primitive that one owner, in 2013, was still getting online orders through a fax machine. So they scrapped the app and decided to replace a restaurant’s entire operating system instead, building it out of Narang’s unheated basement outside Boston.

Their first real install crashed twenty minutes after opening, forcing the staff to scribble orders on paper and copy down credit card numbers by hand while the founders stood there learning, the hard way, that restaurant software cannot ever go down. Toast now runs point of sale for something like one in five restaurants in America and does over two billion dollars a year. The pivot from a nice-to-have to mission critical infrastructure is the whole business lesson here.

Is Natural Gas AI’s Next Bottleneck?

Invest Like the Best · Matthew Smith · 56m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Energy Investor Matthew Smith spent eighteen months modeling every gas well in America and concludes we are headed for a historic supply crunch by 2028, with US consumers likely footing the bill.

An Odyssey in Rankings

The Big Picture · Chris Ryan · 1h 54m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

The Odyssey just posted the biggest movie opening since The Dark Knight Rises, and this episode catches Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and critic Chris Ryan reckoning with it before ranking all thirteen Christopher Nolan films. The best stretch covers what Nolan invented rather than adapted: an entire invading army, the Sea People, that plays as a pointed jab at anti-immigrant politics, plus a description of the sirens’ song so good the hosts didn’t expect it from him.

What makes this one worth your time is the ranking itself, which turns into a real, unresolved fight. Fennessey thinks Oppenheimer and The Odyssey are Nolan’s two best films, full stop. Ryan won’t move off Dunkirk. Dobbins just wants everyone to get along. They land on an order that leaves everybody getting what they want and nobody getting what they want, which is about as honest as a ranking podcast gets.

The Game 7 Story Theo Never Told

The Herd with Colin Cowherd · Theo Epstein · 1h 34m · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

During the rain delay in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Fox called MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and asked whether they could suspend the game and finish it the next night in primetime, worth an estimated 25 million more viewers. Theo Epstein was sitting in that room and heard the pitch get turned down flat. It’s a wild bit of hidden history, a network trying to reschedule the most anticipated Game 7 in a century for ratings, but it’s not even the best part.

Walking back to the clubhouse during that same delay, Epstein expected to find players moping at their lockers. Instead the entire young core, guys not even old enough to rent a car, had gathered on their own in the weight room to regroup. He says that’s the moment he knew they’d already won, before a single pitch of extra innings. Coming from the guy who built the roster, on a walk and talk podcast with Ross and Rizzo themselves, it lands different than any oral history could.

How to Wrestle with John Cena

Good Hang with Amy Poehler · John Cena · 1h 7m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Cena spends a long stretch walking Amy Poehler through exactly how a WWE match gets built in real time: you agree on a story, say he steals ten grand meant for your mother's house, rehearse the finish because it's dangerous, then improvise the first two acts live, feeding your opponent cues, a shouted punch me now, that the crowd can't decode, while a referee is in your ear counting down the minutes.

It's a genuinely startling glimpse into a craft built on trust and constant adjustment, including audibles for hecklers and beach balls thrown into the ring. That alone is worth the hour. But the episode's real center of gravity is his mother: the story of secretly building her a house in his hometown outside Boston, negotiating with a contractor under total secrecy, then handing her the key as a birthday present, is the kind of quietly devastating detail that explains why a guy this famous still needs Poehler to coax him into taking a compliment.

Oprah is Just Like Us

Baby, this is Keke Palmer · Oprah Winfrey · 1h 17m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Media icon Oprah Winfrey admits that in her twenties she once ran after a boyfriend’s car, hit the gravel, and only years later recognized herself in every woman in her family who’d stayed too long.

AI Relationship Coach

Where Should We Begin · Esther Perel · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

A caller to Esther Perel’s show has spent months secretly feeding her boyfriend fights into ChatGPT: copying in their text arguments, asking for scripts, using it live to keep from getting sucked into the same circular blowups. It’s worked. She’s calmer, less reactive, better at holding her ground. Her boyfriend has noticed the change in himself and has no idea why, and since he hates AI, she’s never told him.

Perel skips past the obvious “is this cheating on intimacy” question and goes somewhere sharper: the AI wasn’t just coaching the caller, it was coaching the relationship, and what it actually taught her was differentiation, how to let a partner be different from her without absorbing his version of reality. That matters because her boyfriend has quietly decided she’s naive, a conspiracy skeptic paired with a chemtrail believer, and Perel gets her to see the real fight was never about house guests. It’s about whose read on the world gets to count.

The moment that sticks: mid session, Perel poses a question so pointed the caller pulls out her phone and asks ChatGPT to answer it for her, live, while her actual therapist waits.

Sleeper Cell Cancer Theory

The Oprah Podcast · Siddhartha Mukherjee, Olivia Munn, Simone Ledward Boseman · 1h 2m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee explains why every one of us is already carrying dormant cancer cells, and why chronic inflammation might be the thing that wakes them up. Olivia Munn and Chadwick Boseman's widow bring home the stakes.

Reconsidering Boundaries

10% Happier with Dan Harris · Lori Gottlieb · 1h 15m · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Therapist Lori Gottlieb argues most of us get boundaries backwards: they’re not ultimatums or exits, they’re requests for closer connection. Her example, using her own mother, reframes half the advice you’ve heard on this.

Missing from the Milk Carton

99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 34m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

In 1982, a 12-year-old paperboy named Johnny Gosch vanished from his Iowa route before dawn. Two years later his face became the first ever printed on a milk carton, kicking off a campaign that eventually ran five billion cartons and taught a generation to fear the stranger in the blue car. That’s the story most people half remember.

This episode cares more about who never got a carton.

Around the same time, 29 kids, nearly all Black teenagers, disappeared or turned up dead in Atlanta over two years. No campaign, no national panic, barely a headline outside the city. A historian’s explanation is blunt: innocence, as a media category, has always been racialized, and Atlanta’s kids got called streetwise instead of endangered. The episode carries that same blind spot forward, through an invented statistic (300,000 trafficked kids a year, when the real FBI number is closer to 500) straight into Pizzagate and how people are reading the Epstein files now.

The detail I can’t shake: of 200 kids on the national campaign, only two were ever found because of it. One recognized her own face on a carton in a grocery store and thought, for a second, she was famous. She’d been kidnapped by her own mother, not a stranger.

A History of Nuclear Cover-Ups

Cautionary Tales · Tim Harford · 41m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

In October 1957, the Windscale nuclear reactor caught fire, and works manager Tom Tuohy spent the night climbing eighty feet of scaffolding to peer through an inspection hole at a burning graphite core, with no manual and no precedent for any of it. His own verdict, mid-crisis: “what a bloody mess we’re in.” That’s the disaster.

The episode’s real spine is what happened to the truth afterward: investigator Bill Penny, the same physicist who calculated the detonation height for the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wrote an honest report blaming an under-instrumented, understaffed rush job, and the government locked it in a cabinet for thirty years and blamed the workers instead, so Washington wouldn’t get cold feet about a nuclear partnership.

It took three decades and a records officer named Lorna Arnold, who’d spent her twenties taking meeting minutes nobody let her actually run, to dig the real story out and set it straight. Cautionary Tales is at its best when the hero turns out to be the person who wrote the history down, not just the one who fought the fire.

SpaceX went public and its launch on the NASDAQ is mirroring the escape velocity of the rocket ship business that it’s in (although it’s now starting to return to earth).

Here are podcast episodes that will help you enjoy this long holiday weekend.

KID LIFE

The Man Saving Your Kids from Ads

Conversations with Tyler · Dave Baszucki · 53m · Spotify · Apple · YouTube

Dave Baszucki runs a platform with more than 100 million people (mainly kids) on it every day, and Tyler Cowen spends the hour circling one obvious question: why not turn all those eyeballs into an advertising fortune? Baszucki keeps declining. The money comes instead from Robux, a virtual currency he manages with the caution of a small central bank, pegged at roughly a penny so a creator who saves for five years can trust it will hold.

Dave treats having nine and ten year olds on the platform as something to engineer around, not a fact to deny. It’s the insightful conversation of a CEO who’s gone through his own parenting journey and he clearly applies what he’s learned as a father to his role as a CEO.

MARRIED LIFE

A Relationship’s Four Horsemen

The Mel Robbins Podcast · Julie and John Gottman · 1h 28m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Relationship researchers Julie and John Gottman have spent five decades watching couples fight, often in an apartment lab wired to track heart rate and stress hormones, and they can predict from a short sample whether a marriage will last. Mel Robbins gives them room to explain what they look for, and it turns out the question is not whether couples fight. Everyone fights. It is how.

The warning signs they call the four horsemen are: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

Contempt is the one that frightens them most. In their telling it is corrosive enough to track with how often the listener gets sick in the years that follow. The repairs are smaller than you would expect. John keeps a little notebook in his back pocket, and when Julie tells him they need to talk, he takes it out slowly, partly to listen and partly to keep himself from saying something he will regret.

What stays with you is how plainly they model it, a couple who have studied this for decades and still turn toward each other while the other one talks. The science is the hook. The marriage in the room is the proof.

RECONSTRUCTION

The Case for Frederick Douglas

Revisionist History · Malcolm Gladwell · 50m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Malcolm Gladwell teamed up with Barack Obama for an eight part series on Reconstruction, and the first episode opens on Frederick Douglass at the strangest moment of his life. Slavery is abolished. His life’s work is done. And he has no idea what to do next.

Obama makes the case that Douglass belongs in the American pantheon, a founding father in everything but the timing, and the historians on the show agree. Douglass is one of those rare reformers who lived to see his cause win, then spent the rest of his life defending a victory that kept slipping away.

The history is urgent, and the warning Douglass kept repeating, that the slaveholding spirit had not gone anywhere, lands harder than it should.

AI MODELS

When AI Safety Pushes Companies to China

All-In Podcast · 1h 42m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Anthropic’s new model tops the benchmarks but ships with guardrails that store your prompts and quietly throttle anyone it suspects of building a rival.

Investor David Friedberg makes the sharpest point, from experience. His genomics company used these models to design genetic constructs, work that used to take scientists weeks. Recent restrictions, justified by bioweapon fears, cut that off. So he is moving to open source models he can run himself.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The best open source models right now are Chinese. The more American labs lock down in the name of safety, the more serious work they hand to Beijing. It is a real tension, and the panel sits in it rather than tidying it away.

MICROSOFT

Two Views of the Same Future

Hard Fork · Satya Nadella and Cindy Cohn · 1h 6m · Apple Podcasts

Recorded in front of a live audience, Microsoft's CEO lays out where he thinks AI goes next, followed by the outgoing head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on privacy. Two very different visions of the same future.

STOCK MARKET

The Price to Elon Ratio

My First Million · Sam Parr and Shaan Puri · 1h 8m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri promise the least sophisticated SpaceX IPO breakdown on the internet, then deliver something genuinely useful by refusing to pretend they are experts.

The framing that sticks: SpaceX is really four things stacked together, launches, Starlink, X, and xAI, plus a chip fab Elon Musk is building to get ahead of the shortage. Shaan compares it to shoving two motel beds together into one super bed. Twitter is the sad little footstool at the end, worth half what he paid, carried along by everything around it.

At a valuation near a hundred times revenue, they land on the only metric that explains the price. Forget price to earnings. This is the price to Elon ratio, and you are either buying it or you are not.

WINDING ROAD

Success is Never as Linear as it Looks

WorkLife with Adam Grant · Claire Hughes Johnson · 33m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson has a career that looks inevitable from the outside. She walks through the years of uncertainty and unglamorous slog that the tidy version always leaves out.

MINDSET

What Concerns Can You Actually Influence?

Huberman Lab · Andy Stumpf · 2h 55m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf gives Andrew Huberman an exercise so simple it sounds like nothing, until you try it. Draw a line down a page. On one side, write everything you are worried about. On the other, write what you can actually influence.

The worry side fills up fast: the news, other people, the whole churning world. The influence side, Stumpf says, never holds more than one thing, which is you. How you talk to yourself, how you plan your day, how you respond to whatever lands.

His larger rule is just as plain. When you can, take the slightly harder choice, the small one nobody sees. Over years, that is the whole game. Huberman liked it enough that he says he has done the exercise every week since.

SHOWER POWER

Why Singing Makes You Happier

Stuff You Should Know · 12m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Nearly twenty nine million Americans sing in choirs, making it the most popular participatory art in the country. Josh and Chuck explain what group singing actually does to your mood, and why you might want in.

FRIENDS TALK

Podcast Therapy

Giggly Squad · Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo · 54m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo open this one by admitting that Giggly Squad has quietly replaced actual therapy for both of them, which is either a red flag or exactly the point of a good friendship.

Within four minutes they have invented a business (grippy soles for heeled sandals, genuinely not a bad idea), diagnosed each other’s twenties, and decided that ringing ears mean someone is talking about you. None of it matters and all of it is funny.

This is the comfort listen of the week. If you have ever had a friend who can turn a Monday morning into a bit, you already know why people guard this one so jealously.

STORY TIME

Some Secrets Should Stay Secrets

Dumb Blonde · 39m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Bunnie XO works through listener confessions about what to tell a partner and what to keep to yourself, with a long and very funny detour into the sheer terror of signing a white water rafting waiver.

My kids’ school wrapped-up this week, marking our official transition into summer. I hope you’re able to embrace new beginnings as we transition into the season of sun.

Here are the episodes that I’ll be talking about at little league games this week.

FEATURE FLAG

Finding Comfort in Collapse

Cautionary Tales · Paul Cooper · 41:10 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Historian Paul Cooper studies dead civilizations, and Cooper admits he no longer believes we really learn any lessons from their collapses. The same pattern keeps returning. A strongman strips his province bare to chase the throne, the economy that depended on him goes into free fall, and the whole structure quietly comes apart.

What lifts this above a tour of ruins is where Cooper lands. Every society that gazed at older ruins, he says, felt the same dread we feel now, and despair this ancient is itself a kind of company. Collapse is also the forest fire that lets new growth through. His closing turn, that you should build the things in your life that outlast the upheaval, is the rare history lesson that doubles as a way to live.

THIS WEEK’S TAGS

DESIGN

The Making of Jony Ive

Founders · David Senra · 52:31 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

David Senra rereads the biography of Jony Ive and keeps circling one idea, that Ive’s perfectionism was really a form of respect.

As a student he built more than a hundred foam models of a single project while his classmates managed half a dozen, not to show off but because anything less felt like an insult to the work.

Senra traces it back to Ive’s father, a craftsman and teacher who would point at street lamps on a walk and ask his son why each one was shaped the way it was. The through line is that taste is taught, slowly, by someone who cares. If you have ever wondered why an Apple product felt like a person made it, this is the origin story, and it is more about love than genius.

POLITICS

A Pundit Grades His Own Predictions

Freakonomics Radio · Fareed Zakaria · 1:05:30 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Most pundits never revisit their bad calls. Fareed Zakaria opens this one by reading back his own prediction that America’s institutions would constrain a second Trump term, then flatly says he was wrong.

What follows is a forecaster auditing himself in real time, which is rarer and more useful than just another confident take. His account of the gap between the two terms is the part that sticks. Where the first Trump White House was hemmed in by generals and advisers who said no, the second runs on pure improvisation in pursuit of pleasing one man… what one guest called regime change by jazz.

Zakaria is sharp on why Washington keeps reaching for wars it cannot win, and honest about where his crystal ball has fogged. Listen for the humility as much as the analysis, as it’s the part most of this genre leaves out.

MONEY

Investing is Emotion, Not Intelligence

My First Million · Barry Ritholtz · 54:31 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Barry Ritholtz built an eight billion dollar advisory firm on advice that easily fits on a sticky note.

Put the phone down and stop trading.

His Christmas tree metaphor is the keeper concept. The broad index is the tree, growing steadily whether anyone watches, while your hot stock picks are just the tinsel, fun to hang and almost certain to underperform. The detail that sells it is the confession he drags out of Lloyd Blankfein, who ran Goldman Sachs and now day trades so compulsively that he placed his orders before recording so he would not reach for his phone mid conversation.

If the smartest man in the room cannot resist the worst habit in investing, the lesson is not about intelligence. It is about a temperament that almost nobody has.

BUSINESS

Finding Meaning In A Proxy Fight

All-In Podcast · Dan Loeb · 31:15 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Hedge Fund Manager Dan Loeb built Third Point into a thirty billion dollar fund, but despite the riches it’s clear from this conversation how openly he still enjoys the fight.

He calls himself the original troll, picking apart fraudulent companies on 1990s message boards long before Wall Street Bets existed, armed with what he says were his only real tools back then, shame and humor. His best line, that activism without a proxy contest is like Catholicism without hell, tells you how he sees short selling as something close to a moral act, exposing rot that others would rather leave unnamed.

Dan is candid about the grind that taught him, ten thousand reps on a distressed debt desk, quietly reverse engineering investors like David Tepper. This episode is a portrait of a man who never stopped treating the market as a place to catch people lying.

QUICK SIPS

The Woman Who Felt No Fear — Open a case file of a woman whose rare mutation calcified the fear center of her brain. She cannot feel afraid, and her story becomes an unsettling question about where fear actually lives.

Science Vs · 40:41 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Folding Paper Into Art — A fourteen year old folds 108 versions of one origami pattern in his apartment to test whether it could make emergency shelters stronger and lighter. One held ten thousand times its own weight.

TED Talks Daily · 10:50 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Fatherhood — This episode covers everything from prehistoric family systems to social media expectations as the conversation dives into what it is to be a dad.

Ologies · 1:21:30 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

America’s Female Pastime — Women have been part of baseball since the early days of the 20th century and this enjoyable piece discusses their involvement from past to present.

You’re Wrong About · 1:25:20 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

CLOSING THOUGHT

Summer Bucket List?

What are two things you want to do this summer?

Write down a quick plan for how and when you’ll do it, and email (or tell) a couple of friends your plan to make it a public commitment.

Enjoy these summer days!

I spent the week in London (for work) and was pleasantly surprised by the growing number of bikers zipping throughout the city. Crossing the streets felt slightly more treacherous, but the city feels more communal when surrounded by those on foot and pedal.

Here are the episodes I thoroughly enjoyed as I trounced around London town.

FEATURE FLAG

The Case for Staying Human

Mo Gawdat brings two things to the AI conversation that most people don’t. He spent years inside Google X watching the technology accelerate faster than anyone was saying publicly, and he lost his son in 2014, which has given him an emotional grounding that most discussions of existential risk conspicuously lack.

The conversation starts with the assertion that AI is already here. The interesting part isn’t the claim itself, which Gawdat grounds carefully enough that it doesn’t feel like provocation. It’s what follows from it. If that’s true, the question is no longer how to slow the machine down — it’s how to remain meaningfully human alongside it. And Gawdat’s answer, which he previews from his upcoming book Alive, is warmer than you’d expect. The things AI can’t replicate are exactly the things we’ve been trained to treat devalue, such as presence, care, the willingness to sit with discomfort rather than optimize it away.

The conversation about his son, and why losing him reframed how he thinks about purpose and consciousness, is the part I’m still turning over days later.

The Diary of a CEO · Mo Gawdat · 2h 1m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

THIS WEEK’S TAGS

HISTORY

How a Soccer Tournament Ate the World

You’re about to be inundated with World Cup chatter for the next month. Want to be one of the few who actually knows its history? Throughline traces the arc from a modest 1930 tournament in Uruguay to the multibillion-dollar geopolitical event it is today. This episode is sharp on the mechanics of how it got this big, from television rights to Cold War maneuvering to FIFA corruption. And it’s honest about what it means that the world’s biggest sporting event is now inseparable from Gulf state reputation laundering. Worth listening to now, before the first match kicks off and you have nothing to add when the topic inevitably comes up at a cookout.

Throughline · 52:17 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

BUSINESS

Three Ideas That Actually Work

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri rate seven audience-submitted business ideas on feasibility, differentiation, and upside. And they end up genuinely excited about three of them. What makes this worth your time isn’t the ideas themselves but the evaluative framework they keep returning to: what separates a niche that’s under-served from one that’s just small? The episode is a good window into how they actually think about opportunity, which is worth more than any specific idea they surface.

My First Million · Sam Parr & Shaan Puri · 48:20 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

CULTURE

The Rule That Made Joni Mitchell

Canada’s Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commision (CRTC) once mandated that a minimum percentage of radio airtime go to Canadian artists. It sounds like bureaucratic noodling until Roman Mars talks you through what it actually produced: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Drake, and an entire music ecosystem that simply wouldn’t exist without this specific bureacratic intervention. The episode makes a careful, well-evidenced argument for when cultural market interference works, and what the conditions have to look like for it to succeed rather than calcify.

99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 40:27 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

LIFE

More than a Sex Party

Imagine being at a local toddler class and learning that the mom next to you met her husband when he was one of 31 guys she fluffled at a sex party. The value of this episode is the conversation that would hopefully ensue with that mom. It’s intimate without being voyeuristic and surprising without manufacturing drama. The part I found most interesting is how this mom’s thoughts and feelings about sex have evolved as she experiences the most meaningful output of that act, becoming a mother.

Death Sex & Money · Anna Sale · 48:50 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · Listen

QUICK SIPS

500 Million — Did you know that Pam and Angela from The Office have a podcast and that it has 500 million downloads? I didn’t! In this episode, actors Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey share the full origin story of their podcast for the first time and how a pandemic project with no real expectations turned into one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

1h 5m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Want to Optimize Your Happiness? — Laurie Santos makes the case, backed by a decade of research, that the things we spend our lives optimizing for (more money, more status, etc) consistently underperform. What actually optimizes happiness? The answers are counterintuitive and well evidenced.

47:30 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

The American Roach — The bugs are out and my kids are irrationally freaked. So I’m ready to shine a warm flashlight on an insect that’s survived five mass extinctions. The result is a surprisingly affecting piece about what resilience actually looks like from the inside.

36:46 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

VISUAL MARK

Naked Attraction > Naked & Afraid

My biggest cultural surprise from London: stumbling across the show Naked Attraction on basic cable. Unlike our approach to cover body parts with digital fig leafs, there’s not a body part blur in sight… and it’s surprising how they rather gracefully tap dance on and around a premise that seems so garishly superficial (i.e. selecting a date on appearance alone). I respect the body confidence of the participants, and suspect that heads would explode if this show ever turned up (unedited) on basic cable in the US.