Week 25 - June 19, 2026
IPO liftoff and singing for your health
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.