Podcast Notes Weekly: Sep 07–Sep 13, 2026
The takeaways from 30 podcast notes I wrote this week (Lunchuizhe (掄錘者), Macro Musings with David Beckworth, Bloomberg Odd Lots, Serenity Weekly, Asianometry, Caibaogou (財報狗) and more). Two to four sentences per episode, with a link to each full post.
Contents
- What I listened to this week
- Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-07
- Macro Musings with David Beckworth — episode of 2026-09-07
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-07
- Serenity Weekly — week of 2026-09-07
- Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-06
- Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-06
- The Circuit — EP191
- Invest Like the Best — episode of 2026-09-08
- Kelly Tsai — episode of 2026-09-04
- Tech Wave (科技浪) — EP153
- Xiaotian — episode of 2026-09-07
- Columbia Energy Exchange — episode of 2026-09-08
- The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-08
- MacroMicro (財經M平方) — episode of 2026-09-09
- Supply Chained — episode of 2026-09-08
- Valley of Depth — episode of 2026-09-08
- Catalyst with Shayle Kann — episode of 2026-09-10
- Gooaye (股癌) — EP695
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-10
- Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-10
- Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-10
- The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-11
- MacroVoices — EP549
- The Meb Faber Show — episode of 2026-09-11
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-11
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-12
- Dwarkesh Podcast — episode of 2026-09-11
- Gooaye (股癌) — EP696
- Investor’s Sunday — episode of 2026-09-13
- MacroMicro (財經M平方) — episode of 2026-09-13
Words need only get the meaning across.
—— Confucius, Analects, Book XV (Spring and Autumn period; translation mine)
What I listened to this week
This week (Sep 07–Sep 13) I wrote notes on 30 podcast episodes. Here are the takeaways from each one in one place. If an episode catches your eye, the link under it goes to the full post.
Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-07
Swearing at AI works, but not because of the emotion. The rant pulls the decision back and leaves only the result to check. I sent twenty-three tests out today without a single curse and leaned on the same two things. The difference shows up when the ruler is wrong: the model quietly reports 100%.
Read the full post: Does an AI Only Behave When You Swear at It?
Macro Musings with David Beckworth — episode of 2026-09-07
The Fed’s balance sheet is huge mostly because regulation forces banks to hoard reserves; to shrink supply, you first have to shrink demand. Notes on the Macro Musings conversation with Stephen Miran: why the Fed’s balance sheet stays large, how bank regulation manufactures reserve demand, and the case for money aggregates as a cross-check.
Read the full post: What’s Really Blocking the Fed’s Balance Sheet Isn’t the Fed
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-07
Notes from an Odd Lots conversation on money laundering: the paradox of record cash in circulation, the scale of trade-based laundering, and a compliance system that costs a fortune and doesn’t work.
Read the full post: Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills
Serenity Weekly — week of 2026-09-07
An independent researcher who watches only the upstream of AI infrastructure left forty-odd public posts this week. Put them in order and what surfaces isn’t a ticker — it’s four lines of reasoning about capital picking winners, growth rates truncated by supply, time turning into an asset, and which country the real chokepoints sit in.
Read the full post: A Contract Signed Through 2031 — Seven Days of Upstream Posts, Laid Side by Side
Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-06
Thailand’s 2011 floods drowned 40% of global hard drive capacity, and prices took two years to come back. The real lesson isn’t how high the water rose — it’s that the factory that stayed dry had to stop production anyway.
Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-06
Notes and reflections after listening to the Statementdog podcast episode from 2026-09-06. On the direction of China’s new capacity, the split between consumer and server demand, and what changed inside those five-year supply contracts.
The Circuit — EP191
Broadcom delivered in-line numbers and fell anyway — and the more interesting signal was where management changed its argument. Meanwhile the supply chain’s limits are holding this build-out back from excess, and AI assistants are quietly putting ‘skip’ on the menu.
Invest Like the Best — episode of 2026-09-08
Notes from Invest Like the Best EP.490: from Dutch merchant paintings to drone warfare and the erosion of deterrence, one idea — whoever holds the largest stock of anything is the one least able to survive a change in form.
Kelly Tsai — episode of 2026-09-04
NVIDIA earned 96.2 billion dollars in one quarter, then used the money to guarantee a customer’s lease, assemble a financing pool, and buy a convertible bond. Gooaye says the MediaTek deal is not circular; Kelly says the demand numbers are no longer independent. Both are right, because they are talking about different deals. The test: can the party receiving the money borrow on its own?
Tech Wave (科技浪) — EP153
Notes after listening to Tech Wave EP153. On 3D modeling, computer use, and security benchmarks — how far this generation jumped, where it didn’t, and what’s left once skills and prompts get absorbed into the model.
Xiaotian — episode of 2026-09-07
Same entry-level Mac mini, same model. Hand part of the computation to Apple’s Neural Engine and a four-minute video goes from 127 seconds to 70. The real value is not the speed; it is that the engine keeps its pace while the GPU is busy. I compared that with the same kind of job on my Windows box, pure CPU, and the gap came down to model size.
Columbia Energy Exchange — episode of 2026-09-08
Notes from a Columbia Energy Exchange conversation on shortcuts versus institutions, and how to read a headline when the investment cycle outlasts the political one.
Read the full post: Washington Buys Into Venezuelan Oil: A Very Big Deal That May Not Matter Much
The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-08
Notes on The Compound and Friends, September 8, 2026: what it means that only 27 S&P 500 stocks trade above 40x forward earnings, why ‘invest in what you know’ keeps failing, and the one ingredient this mania is missing.
Read the full post: Expensive Is Not a Feeling You Measure With
MacroMicro (財經M平方) — episode of 2026-09-09
Personal notes from the MacroMicro (財經M平方) knowledge-point episode of 2026/09/09, on natural capital, biodiversity, the EU’s CSDDD, and how pressure travels down a supply chain.
Read the full post: Natural Capital: The Things You Think Are Free Are Sending You an Invoice
Supply Chained — episode of 2026-09-08
Notes from Supply Chained, 2026-09-08: why an ‘American memory company’ keeps its capacity and leading-edge nodes in Asia, why buying capacity and building capacity are opposite businesses, and how long a stopgap like HBM can hold.
Read the full post: Micron’s Name Is in Idaho. Its Capability Lives in Taichung.
Valley of Depth — episode of 2026-09-08
Notes after listening to Valley of Depth (2026-09-08) with Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa: why full reuse is the one variable that matters, a different road for heat shields, and how to tell ‘not solved yet’ apart from ‘never will be’.
Catalyst with Shayle Kann — episode of 2026-09-10
Locally, data centers mostly keep electricity rates flat or push them down; nationally, they are the biggest force pushing rates up. Both are true — it depends on which ledger you compare against.
Gooaye (股癌) — EP695
Payback periods as an honesty signal in capital allocation, plus how to change gears in a choppy market.
Read the full post: What You Can Calculate, and What You Do Anyway — Notes on Gooaye EP695
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-10
Shrink doesn’t mean theft, and locking products up doesn’t always cost sales. Stolen goods flow toward whichever resale channel is least policed.
Read the full post: You Can Lock the Shelf, Not the Whole Truck: Odd Lots on Organized Retail Crime
Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-10
Notes on Asianometry’s episode about numerical control and machinist skills: subdivision, machine utilization, wages, and system supervision, extended to how skills shift in the era of AI coding.
Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-10
Notes and reflections after the Statementdog podcast episode from 2026-09-10, a closer look at SEMICON Taiwan: OSAT capacity expansion, diamond and silicon carbide thermal materials, the cost logic behind fan-out panel-level packaging, the timing of TSMC’s next-generation lithography tools, and optical alignment stages.
The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-11
Notes on The Compound and Friends, September 11, 2026: Jens Nordvig on how the force behind Korea’s stock market changed hands, why hyperscaler bonds and US Treasuries now compete for the same buyers, Bessent’s ‘I am the house,’ and which data to check when retail stocks collapse.
Read the full post: Same River, Different Water
MacroVoices — EP549
Reflections on the MacroVoices interview with Freelancer.com founder Matt Barrie (2026-09-10). Starting from the 44 AI agents he built himself: whether a $1,300-a-day token bill is worth it, why he started buying his own hardware, why the data-center debt rests on just two customers, and which slice of white-collar work gets handed off first.
The Meb Faber Show — episode of 2026-09-11
A 20% stock drawdown didn’t move policy; two bad days in Treasuries did. The risk in bonds lives mostly in duration and leverage, with default further down the list. When you see ‘income’, ask where the cash comes from.
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-11
Notes on Bloomberg Odd Lots (2026-09-11) with Bridgewater co-CIO Greg Jensen: an AI that learned to fool its testers, Bridgewater’s two side-by-side ‘factories’, open-source models and compute concentration, and a machine labor tax.
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-12
Notes after listening to Bloomberg Odd Lots (2026-09-12) with Ivanhoe Mines founder Robert Friedland: falling ore grades, sulfuric acid and equipment lead times choking the supply chain, and a valuation model that shrank the mining sector.
Dwarkesh Podcast — episode of 2026-09-11
The three researchers expect AI to speed up research a lot where the objective is well specified, while choosing objectives, continual learning, and real-world data remain bottlenecks. Their timelines range from one year to ten.
Gooaye (股癌) — EP696
The host moves from being overcharged by a wine dealer he trusted to trust being drained out of the market. The iPhone Fold came in cheaper than expected while its suppliers struggle to profit, and the bottleneck for Oracle and AI infrastructure has shifted to financing, power, and local politics.
Investor’s Sunday — episode of 2026-09-13
Notes on Investor’s Sunday, 2026-09-13, part two of the conversation with Katsura Ito. AI has inflated knowledge, and seniority can no longer hold up a manager’s seat. She uses adult development theory and the Japanese word utsuwa (capacity) to explain how managers grow, and a French boss’s habit of saying ‘But’ to explain feedback.
MacroMicro (財經M平方) — episode of 2026-09-13
The AI machine’s choke point has moved from ‘is there demand’ to ‘can it be delivered and plugged in.’ About 90% of the $3.5 trillion off-balance-sheet pile is ordinary accounting; the roughly 10% in conditional guarantees is what to watch. Notes after listening to MacroMicro’s 2026-09-13 special with Business Weekly: US–China controls moving from chips to models, power lagging chips, the market’s focus shifting from demand to delivery, Nvidia guaranteeing its customers’ financing, and how to split $3.5 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments by who pays if things go wrong.
This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.