Week 24 - June 12, 2026
Finding comfort in collapse and the making of Jony Ive
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!