Season #5 Podcast Finale

The goal at the outset of our podcast was to answer a fundamental question—what lessons are people accumulating over the course of their life? These lessons differ from the ones we learn in school in that they are more grounded in gritty reality. For instance, exceptionally smart people (like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara) can do very dumb things. That lesson was from Congressman Jim Himes regarding the US invasions of both Vietnam and Iraq.

While our guests are varied, certain topics keep coming up—geopolitics, money, the arts, and story-telling. In each conversation, my goal is to get a sense of how the guest thinks, understand their life work, and extract their life lessons. I have yet to hear the same “life lesson” twice. The podcast has been downloaded over 50,000 times in 83 countries and in cities from Montreal, Canada to Perth, Australia. My producer, Dave Manahan, is an invaluable partner.

Our final episode this season is with Faye Keegan, a former colleague, and co-founder of Dipsea, which creates erotic audio stories for women. Faye started off in finance and we were briefly on the same team at our former employer, Bridgewater. Then she made a turn toward what turned out to be Dipsea. You can hear the full episode here.

I was interested in her shift away from finance and also how differently men and women process story and fantasy. “Women are less likely to want to see Leonardo DiCaprio naked and more likely to want to know what he had for breakfast,” said Faye. She’s done a lot of research into why that is.

Relative to my usual subject matter, Faye was an outlier, which is what makes her story particularly interesting and perfect for a holiday. The rest of our Season #5 conversations covered Ukraine, Chile/electric vehicles, and populism.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling talked about his remarkable career and what is unfolding in Ukraine. Carnegie expert Andrew Weiss talked about his recent book on Putin and Russian politics. Tbilisi-based political activist Dachi Imedadze discussed how Georgian youth are trying to turn to the West while avoiding a Ukrainian-style implosion.

Earlier this year, I went to Chile to look firsthand at how the extraction of lithium and copper is going as part of the electric vehicle revolution. I spoke with journalist Henry Sanderson about the global metals trade and writer John Dinges about the CIA’s legacy in the Pinochet era. Chile’s copper makes it into global supply chains via the shipping industry and J Mintzmyer educated us about that.

Finally, we discussed politics and populism with Senator Chris Murphy and journalist and Latin America expert Francisco Toro. I leave later this month for Europe and will post sporadically from the road. We will be back to our regular cadence in September, including a fantastic lineup of already booked podcast guests. I was also recently a guest on the podcast The Wall Street Skinny where we talked about what a hedge fund actually is.

If you like this podcast, ratings on Apple podcast help draw others to it, as do Amazon reviews of Raising a Thief and Master, Minion. To my US readers, Happy 4th!