Podcast Notes Weekly: Sep 14–Sep 20, 2026
The takeaways from 31 podcast notes I wrote this week (Acquired, Asianometry, Macro Musings with David Beckworth, Bloomberg Odd Lots, Serenity Weekly, Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) and more). Two to four sentences per episode, with a link to each full post.
Contents
- What I listened to this week
- Acquired — episode of 2026-09-13
- Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-13
- Macro Musings with David Beckworth — episode of 2026-09-14
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-14
- Serenity Weekly — week of 2026-09-14
- Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-14
- Tech Wave (科技浪) — EP154
- Xiaotian — episode of 2026-09-11
- Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-15
- The Circuit — EP192
- Columbia Energy Exchange — episode of 2026-09-15
- Invest Like the Best — episode of 2026-09-16
- Supply Chained — episode of 2026-09-15
- Catalyst with Shayle Kann — episode of 2026-09-17
- Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-17
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-17
- Xiaotian — episode of 2026-04-25
- Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-17
- Behind the Balance Sheet — episode of 2026-09-17
- Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-17
- The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-18
- Dwarkesh Podcast — episode of 2026-09-17
- Gooaye (股癌) — EP697
- MacroVoices — EP550
- The Meb Faber Show — episode of 2026-09-18
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-18
- War on the Rocks — episode of 2026-09-17
- Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-19
- Gooaye (股癌) — EP698
- Investor’s Sunday — episode of 2026-09-20
- MacroMicro (財經M平方) — EP214
There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy” (1854)
What I listened to this week
This week (Sep 14–Sep 20) I wrote notes on 31 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.
Acquired — episode of 2026-09-13
Home Depot’s moat lived in its knowledgeable store associates and the stock in their hands; a CEO focused on current-period numbers dismantled both, doubling revenue while the stock stood still. His successor stopped opening stores and made every existing one stronger.
Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-13
Notes on Asianometry’s trip report from Hot Chips and Semicon Taiwan: the return of AI chip startups, the packaging shift driven by ever-bigger chips, the scramble for compute, and the host’s estimate that compute flips from shortage to glut in 2027 — extended to how to test a shortage consensus and read conference buzz.
Macro Musings with David Beckworth — episode of 2026-09-14
Listening notes on the 2026-09-14 Macro Musings episode: former Treasury Under Secretary Nellie Liang on stablecoins after the GENIUS Act — the historical warning about private money, how much Treasury bill demand each stablecoin dollar creates, and what the global dollar gains and loses.
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-14
Notes on Bloomberg Odd Lots (2026-09-14) with OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman: the response after a model broke out of its sandbox, pacing and coordination among frontier labs, graders getting gamed, and how compute budgets get split.
Serenity Weekly — week of 2026-09-14
The most useful move this week is splitting a ‘demand upgrade’ into three layers: the total forecast, content per chip, and component prices that are already moving. Lasers showed evidence at all three layers this week; for memory, whether a price hike passes through depends on the component’s share of the finished product’s price.
Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-14
Check two things on a GPU first: video memory decides how big a model fits, and BF16 decides whether new tools run smoothly. An old card without BF16 still works, but every new tool means checking whether it trips over the missing piece. On my older AMD card a workaround took image generation from 43 seconds per step down to 14; the same trick on video produced a broken file. AI can help you work around software problems.
Read the full post: Picking a GPU for Local AI: The New Cards Worth Buying, and the Old Ones to Skip
Tech Wave (科技浪) — EP154
Listening notes on TechWave EP154 (2026-09-14): the backstory and credit dispute behind OpenAI’s claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem, and whether Anthropic’s CEO calling for an AI slowdown is sincere or strategic.
Xiaotian — episode of 2026-09-11
Marvis puts the settings entry point in front of you, so one click shows you where things live, and its rules forbid calling something normal when it couldn’t check. Small problems caught me twice: once a script reported ‘not found’ for things that were there, once an AI handed me a button it could press itself.
Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-15
Caibaogou episode 564 hosts clinical psychologist Huang Tien-hao on the boundaries between guidance, counseling and therapy, how to pick a therapist, and why a changed thought is not a changed person.
The Circuit — EP192
Apple moved its whole lineup to 2nm this year, yet this episode spent most of its time on vapor chambers, where memory sits, and the compute cost of security. I now ask how long a spec can hold before I ask how big it is.
Columbia Energy Exchange — episode of 2026-09-15
Oil barely rallied in the first half of the war because inventories, strategic reserves and Chinese refinery cuts absorbed the shortfall. Those buffers ran out in September, so a deficit of roughly 5 million barrels a day now shows up directly in prices, and diesel and refining capacity are the tightest links.
Invest Like the Best — episode of 2026-09-16
Moritz turned the first-fourteen-years question he asked founders for decades onto himself: one grandfather stayed, one left; his mother predicted disaster every morning. That gave him vigilance and grit, and it still keeps him from enjoying his own success.
Supply Chained — episode of 2026-09-15
Hot Chips was about AI chip startups; SEMICON Taiwan was about how to build and ship the hardware. To tell whether a technology is still talk or already happening, look at which tools the supply chain is changing and what it is spending money on.
Catalyst with Shayle Kann — episode of 2026-09-17
Shayle Kann thinks the market underestimates both solar growth and the grid’s second wind. Before trusting any forecast, check which direction it has missed in the past.
Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) — episode of 2026-09-17
Doing AI at home takes two kinds of machine: a control desk that stays on all day and directs your AI helpers, and compute that does the crunching. The YouTuber uses a roughly 4,000-yuan M4 Mac mini as his desk and sends model work elsewhere. Before buying, ask which one you lack. A desk is judged on stability, power draw and software; compute on video memory and BF16 support, and occasional compute can be rented first.
Read the full post: Mac mini or a GPU for AI at home? First figure out which machine you’re missing
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-17
Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy can keep people fed and comfortable, but it can’t satisfy their need to be recognized. Who people compare themselves with, and what they expect, shape their mood more than progress statistics do, and that mood ends up rewriting policy.
Xiaotian — episode of 2026-04-25
When a local model is slow, the bottleneck is often moving data, not compute. On a 4090, quantization took the YouTuber from 20 to 48 tokens a second, multi-token prediction to 108, and DFlash diffusion drafting to an average of 141 and a peak of 184. Each step rescued a different stage. My 8GB card couldn’t even hold the model; switching to one that activates only a slice of its parameters per token took it from 1.8 to 23.
Asianometry — episode of 2026-09-17
Asianometry’s 2026-09-17 episode tells how an oil giant walked into the office equipment business and squared off against IBM. These are listening notes on separating a diagnosis from its prescription, how resources turn into ropes, and one question for deciding whether something is worth your time.
Read the full post: The Five Years Exxon Tried to Beat IBM — Notes on an Asianometry Episode
Behind the Balance Sheet — episode of 2026-09-17
Notes from Behind the Balance Sheet #63 with David Gardner: why he buys high, why ‘wildly overvalued’ makes him more interested, and how the ‘sleep number’ turns position sizing into a question you can actually answer.
Read the full post: He Buys Stocks After They’ve Already Run: David Gardner’s Thirty-Year Method
Caibaogou (財報狗) — episode of 2026-09-17
Notes after listening to the Statementdog podcast (2026-09-17): why the market shrugged when AI labs collectively called for slowing down, what compliance costs actually looked like in banking and crypto, and what an optical trade show with no settled standards means for reading the industry.
The Compound and Friends — episode of 2026-09-18
Listening notes from The Compound and Friends, 2026-09-18: how market narratives get repriced, the interests behind the AI safety debate, and how to turn ‘when does the bull market end’ into conditions you can actually check.
Read the full post: When Everyone Agrees Something Is Doomed — Notes on Tom Lee and Dan Ives
Dwarkesh Podcast — episode of 2026-09-17
Notes after listening to Dwarkesh Podcast’s interview with OpenAI researcher Noam Brown on multi-agent systems, alignment, and recursive self-improvement.
Gooaye (股癌) — EP697
Notes on Gooaye EP697 — unpacking the motives behind Big AI’s call for regulation, how regulatory capture works, and why ‘slowing down’ may consume more compute, not less.
Read the full post: Gooaye EP697: When Three People Who Can’t Stand Each Other Suddenly Agree
MacroVoices — EP550
Notes on MacroVoices #550 with Harley Bassman: ten-year breakevens, mortgage convexity, and three traps hiding inside ETFs — what the bond market is really pricing.
Read the full post: What the Market Was Actually Pricing on Hike Day — Notes on MacroVoices #550
The Meb Faber Show — episode of 2026-09-18
Listening notes on The Meb Faber Show #651 with Roger Ibbotson: a century of stock and bond returns, human capital and age, popularity-based pricing, and what he found when he graded his own fifty-year-old forecast.
Read the full post: The Math Is Simple — So Why Isn’t Everyone Rich? Notes on Roger Ibbotson
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-18
Notes from Odd Lots, 2026-09-18: pass-through businesses, car dealers and dentists, and the missing layer in America’s wealth distribution.
Read the full post: America Is Full of Rich People, and They Aren’t on the Forbes List
War on the Rocks — episode of 2026-09-17
‘We’re ready’ means nothing without an object. The interceptors and fleet-time spent on Iran got billed to a different column: the Pacific.
Read the full post: War on the Rocks | After the Iran War, What’s Left in the Magazine
Bloomberg Odd Lots — episode of 2026-09-19
Notes from Bloomberg Odd Lots, 2026-09-19, with Gene Sykes — Goldman Sachs co-head of global M&A and president of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. How existing venues underwrite a ‘privately funded’ 2028 LA Games, why this is the biggest M&A year on record, and how to read the claim that only 2% of companies see AI in their EPS.
Gooaye (股癌) — EP698
From an indie booth at Tokyo Game Show to the AMD price-hike story and the CCL downgrade panic, plus an index at highs while everyone turns bearish. Listener notes on reading a bear case that only covers half the chain.
Read the full post: Code Words, Scapegoats, and a Choppy Tape — Notes on Gooaye EP698
Investor’s Sunday — episode of 2026-09-20
Listening notes on Investor’s Sunday, 2026-09-20: twenty-five years of DEI in Japanese companies, why opinion diversity is harder than headcount ratios, and whether investors should watch the board or the executive officer tier.
MacroMicro (財經M平方) — EP214
Notes on MacroMicro After Meeting EP 214: the Fed raised rates a quarter point after three years, 12-0. The added sentence in the statement, why the dot plot and SEP must be read together, and two researchers publicly dissecting why they called it wrong.
Read the full post: The Fed Hiked After All — A Tightening the Economy Forced
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.