Week 30 - July 24, 2026
An American running the biggest Mexican cartel and a Game 7 story never before told
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.