#There's no time for my rant on timescales in this story

[rurpleplayssims]

[fandom-space-princess]

ooohhh would you mind sharing the reasons you don't like booktok? i have some reasons of my own but im really interested in the opinion who actually has to deal with the consequences of it all more directly. only if you want of course!

Oh goodness, grab your beach towel anon. Usually you'd have to go to the sea for this much salt.

(Prefacing this with the fact that this is just my opinion, not meant to be emblematic of like... booksellers as a whole, or my employer, or anything. It's also anecdata; nothing here is backed up by anything more than personal observation. I'm just a guy with a keyboard and an attitude. This also isn't meant to be a dig at anybody's taste in books/stories. I'm a supernatural blog, I have no legs to stand on in that regard.)

The things I most dislike about booktok, in no particular order:

1). The tendency toward quick consumption of stories without deeper or more lasting investment is an issue I have with a lot of media (see: Netflix dropping an entire series of something that everyone has watched, and then moved on from, in a week), but I think the problems inherent to that model of engagement become acute when the media in question is books. Novels are long-form storytelling by design; you're meant to sit with them for a while. Books in a series can take years, even decades, between publication. It's hard to convince people to engage with stories on that kind of timescale when we're constantly having our attention spans whittled away under a neverending barrage of buy-the-next-thing consumerism.

2). Tiktok is not only a principal motivator for this kind of behavior, it literally could not exist without it. Booktok doesn't encourage people to sit with books for a long time. It encourages you to *constantly* be consuming something new, *constantly* be pushing your friends to do the same, *constantly* be gaming the algorithm if you want to have any kind of significant presence. The environment does not encourage deep-dives; it leaves no time for contemplation. If you're participating in the culture as designed, you move through books very quickly.

From a business perspective (i.e. the capitalistic one), this is great. From the perspective of an indie bookseller, this is a pain in the ass on so many levels. Have you ever worked a retail Christmas rush? Where something you'd normally sell maybe three of in a year is suddenly The Hot Item, and the public demands you have 9000 of them in stock overnight?

It's unpleasant, is what I'm saying.

2b). The other thing this encourages? Stories that do not challenge people. Again, this is not to slander anyone's personal tastes. But ask yourself: what plays well to the greatest audience? What is most likely to draw customers, gain views, boost engagement? It isn't nuance. It isn't subtlety, isn't grappling with complex morality. All of those are things which I personally find intensely valuable about the experience of reading, and which I find pretty uniformly lacking in booktok's thing-of-the-week. This has an interesting overlap with the resurgence of censorship and purity culture that I think is worth examining, and maybe I'll rant about that some other time. As it stands, I find the trend toward Marvel-ification of fiction (simpler! louder! less nuance! more buzzwords!) to be obnoxious.

3). Speaking of buzzwords, the trend toward marketing new fiction using only a half-assed combination of tropes and comps drives me up a wall. I can't tell you how many ARCs I've seen in the last few months with bare-bones summaries and blurbs to the effect of "for fans of enemies-to-lovers and Game of Thrones, an endearing story of found family and the power of love!" Ok?? Fine in moderation, I guess, but even if I liked all of those things, what is in this book? Did the publisher not bother... asking the writer? Did they not leave them time to write a proper summary? Did they just not care, and hope replace a genuine marketing strategy with SEO?

Idk, maybe there's a benefit to this I can't see. Drives me absolutely bonkers, though.

4). The tags for my original post mentioned Colleen Hoover, who is the target of my ire at the moment because I've been pulling books for her fans all week, per point (2). No offense intended to Ms. Hoover, who I know nothing about but I'm sure is a perfectly normal author looking to get paid for her work, or even to her books, which are not my kind of thing but clearly are somebody's. FULL offense to Hachette for those books, though. They are everything I hate in paperback form: boring, ugly cover after boring, ugly cover. Really REALLY cheaply printed; about 1 in 3 arrive with some kind of damage, because they're so badly made that they don't hold up to even light jarring during shipping. The binding is... sad. Like. Even very bad books deserve better than this. But does the publisher care? Are they motivated to craft a higher quality product? Like hell they are! Because every booktok-er will buy them anyway. They're not interested in a product that will last; they're not looking for an object to cherish for life, a book to pick up and read over and over and over and over again until the spine cracks and the pages start falling out. That'll happen to these goddamn things by the second reread, but how many of them will get that reread is debatable, because by then I'll be selling that crowd The Next New Big Thing.

Anyway. I'll stop there. Thank you, anon, for your ask, and giving me a chance to vent a little bit. Wishing you a hot tea and a good, well-crafted story to liven up your day <3

[veryvincible]

A while back I was confused about comics and where to start. I honestly can’t thank you enough. You have spend a generous amount of your time writing posts for me and I appreciate it. I feel so blessed and hopefully I can unpack this world of comics. I want to read so much of Tony content!

So right now, there’s two iron man 2020 books? And are they new reader friendly? I will check out your recommendation before reading anything new. Btw how does the timeline work in comics? Can I just pick any run and read? Or I should follow a reading order?

Thank you so so so much!

I’m so glad I could help! 

I’ll answer your last question first, since it’s kind of the easiest one: technically, yes, you can just pick any run and read. That can be a little tricky, since writers can be inconsistent; and if you’re unfamiliar with comics, the sequence of events can be difficult to follow if you don’t have some kind of order. It’s not impossible, just harder.

As for reading orders! Since I don’t know your preferences (and all the reading order lists I currently have available to me are Steve/Tony-related), I’m not sure what direction, exactly, to point you in. If you are interested in Steve/Tony content, this is a nice collection of lists from Sineala (it’s recommended that you don’t start with Ultimates, though, so keep that in mind) and this doc from kiyaar can help you with that.

If you’d like something more personalized (which I’m sure I can provide for your eventually, though probably not without some peer review), I have a few questions for you:

1) Are you able to be engaged with the “classics” (basically just vintage comics that are harder to read for some as a result of the art and narrative style)? Do you want to read the classics?

2) Do you want to read everything in chronological order (mostly), or do you want to go bigger event by bigger event and then figure it out from there?

3) So, you want Tony-specific content. Do you also want ship-specific content, and are there other characters you’re also interested in?

I wouldn’t recommend Iron Man 2020 (the Arno-related run) or Iron Man (2020) (the new Cantwell run) without context. In all honesty, I struggle to recommend either of them at all at this time, but especially for beginners. I wouldn’t recommend Tony Stark: Iron Man (Slott), either. I can get into all the reasons why these aren’t my favorite runs to rec if you’re interested, but if you’re more focused on finding something that is worth reading, I’ll spare you my rants. ;)

As for the timeline-- I’m assuming you’re talking about the Big Bad Sliding Timescale here, which isn’t actually all that scary if you can have a good grasp on retcons.

Basically, due to the fact that a lot of these characters we know and love today were created a good few decades ago, and comics pick up on the times in order to place their characters in realistic settings/remain relevant, Marvel Comics (and other publishing companies) had to figure out how to keep their characters perpetually young-ish and perpetually relevant.

So, you have a lot of things scrapped and rewritten as you go. It becomes especially clear when you have a character who’s supposed to be around 35 in his current comics talking about the Vietnam War and his feelings on how it’s progressing in older comics, or when you take a look at how Tony Stark got into the accident that fucked up his heart in the first place.

Nothing in Marvel comics is explicitly linked to a set time (I believe); yes, they’re going to date themselves repeatedly with references and topical commentary, but this is generally supposed to be something we accept despite the inconsistencies. It’s what keeps content interesting and relevant, and, honestly, it can be pretty neat to see how your favorite characters responded to semi-historical events as they happened. 

Tl;dr: If I recall specifics correctly, the past few decades of content have all been said to occur within the past 10-15 in-canon years. Because Marvel wants to stay relevant and they’ve been around for a long while, they’re shifting things around a lot in order to make that true even when it doesn’t make the most sense, and we all just kind of had to get used to it.

So, don’t worry too much about the Sliding Timescale, especially with regards to events like Tony’s origin story that are dependent on more topical events. 

[hellyeahheroes]

Uncanny X-Men #11 is Outright Vile

Women in refrigerators. POCs killed for white people narratives. Anti-vaccinator and pro-suicide messages. Return of FascistCap. This book has it all. So obviously, all kinds of trigger warnings below.

I will not be posting any pages from the Uncanny X-Men #11. Not a single one. At least aside from that first page which reads like a bad joke anyway. Yes, this stuff is an actual page of this book. And I urge others to do the same and not post anything from it. When previously I would find this book to just be awful at this point it has reached levels of being openly mean-spirited and spiteful. While Matthew Rosenberg talks on his twitter how he wanted to discuss serious topics in this issue, dealing with personal experience of self-harm and suicidal thoughts, neither he nor anyone else at Marvel took care to actually warn potential readers the book flat out shows a suicide scene for shock value and I have already heard reports it has triggered people. So I urge everyone to not post these pages less we trigger more people.

Yes, the book has a character commit suicide. The story has a subplot of Cyclops searching for Blindfold, whom Rosenberg claims to be one of his favorite X-Men. And after reading this issue I have flat out said on twitter and I will say it here - could have fooled me. Scott finds her too late, as she already has slit her wrists in the bathtub. So this is what her story amounts too. She dies so that Scott Summers can feel sad. Or sadder, he wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows since page one. A character created after 90′s and not popular enough to get resurrected in the next 20 years dies so that people who come back to life more often than Jesus can pretend death in comics still has a meaning. A woman dies so that a man can feel sad. The page above is right. Every X-men story really IS the same.

This is not delivered with any respect whatsoever either. On the previous page, we had Madrox telling Scott where he can find Ruth and to leave her alone and then we get a splash of her death with coloring and art so bad you had to actually study it carefully to realize she is, in fact, not naked. As far as lack of respect goes it is out there with that godawful Heroes in Crisis cover showing dead Poison Ivy, wrists slit, ass up. 

What’s more is that at the end we have a backup story, so-called Last Blindfold Story. Which pretty much explains that she did it because she’s been tormented by visions of her own death and cannot see any possible future in which she does not get killed. And this is very obviously a clear metaphor for invasive thoughts, all the dark scenarios people tend to run in their heads about how everything is going to turn horrible, there is nothing good awaiting us in life, no hope or future, just continuous series of crushing failures, disappointments, humiliations and all-around misery so it is better if we just killed ourselves. I know that feeling, even though I am not diagnosed with anything. I will say even I had these feelings to deal with after coming today from a, particularly disastrous day at work that made me dread my future and indeed made me think of killing myself. And then I’ve read this book and do you want to know how this whole story came out to me? It told me that this voice telling me to end myself is right, that every scenario I envision not only will happen but is inevitable and it is better to just kill myself. Thankfully, being spoiled the contents beforehand made it I reacted to the pages more with anger than getting put into an even shittier mood, I certainly did not need it. 

I do beleive Matthew Rosenberg, just like Tom King on Heroes in Crisis, means well, I really do. I do believe each of them is trying to tell a personal story. But we really need to sit down and talk about how the mainstream comics portray and handle topics like anxiety depression, other kinds of mental illness and disorders, self-harm or suicide because for every book that deals with it with respect like recent Unstoppable Wasp or Mister Miracle, and you notice these are always niche titles, we have a high-profile book that completely botches it for shock value and preserving the status quo. Rosenberg might be working through some personal issues but he does so in a way that doesn’t seem to realize the damage he is doing all around.

Speaking of shock value this issue also casually kills of Loa, one of Marvel’s very few Pacific Islander characters. Worse that scene, in the end, serves nothing, it is there to shock you and does not add up anything. You cannot even say that it was done to push Blindfold to her suicide or to show the situation really is that serious. It amounts to nothing in Ruth’s storyline and the latter is being hammered down through the entire issue anyway, this is completely redundant death done only to get people talking. How am I supposed to believe that X-Men writers and editorial really, as they claim to, care for these characters when they write something that treats them as disposable. Similarly, aging of Velocidad done from overuse of his powers is there only to nod Wolverine more into getting back into the game, something that so many other elements, including his conversation with Blindfold, already accomplish, making it redundant. What does that leave us with, however? Two POC characters killed or alerted beyond saving to show how serious the situation is and two teenage girls killed to make things look bad and grim for our manly heroes? For a franchise that prides itself for being a metaphor for minorities, X-Men sure treat women and minorities as nothing but props for stories about white guys.

When we are at treating other characters as props I cannot help but mention that Captain America, Black Widow, and Winter Soldier show up here to protect a mutant-hating rally from any mutants who would want to start a riot. And even though they tell you they want to protect both sides Cap sure didn’t step in when the mob tried to kill Cyclops for speaking his mind but stepped in only when he started fighting back. He had no real answer to Summers accusing him of protecting fascists either. I do wonder what do Mark Waid and Ta-Nehishi Coates think of their efforts to fix Captain America after Secret Empire being flushed down the drain for the sake of an outdated message of mutant isolationism. They did the same with Phil Urich, making him a coward who refuses to do his job out of fear of public opinion. And topped on some old-fashioned ageism by having Chamber, a Gen X character, go and tell Scott, a Baby Boomer, to give up...while Millenials are sacrificed to prop said Baby boomer’s story. And I don’t care Jordan D. White is ranting on twitter with Marvel sliding timescale O5 are now “true” Millennials, nobody cared for this thing in a long, long time and he comes off as bitter old man trying to pretend he is still young.

Speaking of the said rally we need to address the problem of the whole mutant vaccine plotline. And is it me or does the whole thing comes off as anti-vaccinators propaganda, with evil bigots trying to practice eugenics by forcing mandatory vaccines on kids that somehow work on something genetic? Is this really the way you want to use the mutant metaphor? To equate your heroes with a bunch of idiots who don’t want to vaccinate their kids for stupid and often bigoted reasons like assinine belief vaccines cause autism and they’d rather their kid died than be autistic? Is this really a message you want to be sending? Maybe next X-men will start wearing MAGA hats, proclaim Earth flat and draw comparisons to “blue lives” defenders?

It is not that the story is dark. I like dark stories. I love them even I’d say. But there is a difference between being dark and being pointlessly grimdark for the sake of it. One of the reasons why I read superhero comics and why I am a fan of Earn Your Happy Ending narratives is that I find inspirations in seeing superheroes being knocked down and still raising, still pressing forward until they win against all the odds and prove that yes, there is a reason to fight another day. But so far Uncanny X-Men made it abundantly clear this will not be another day in which I or my generation are welcome. I have no doubt X-Men will win in the end. but it will not be X-men with Blindfold and it will not be X-Men with Loa and it will be not X-Men with Velocidad. It will not be X-Men with any of the characters I care about at all. It will be X-Men that made it clear not only am I not welcome here, the book actively things the world will be a better place if I and my entire generation were gone so that it can relive good old days alone.

But hey, it had two guys beating up mooks on a splash page so it CLEARLY means the franchise is on the right trac /sarcasm.

- Admin

[in-a-trans-like-state]

@mutagensoup​ repiled to your post

Yo what book is this about?                             

Its History of Ancient Britain by Neil Oliver (its the book accompanying the BBC docu series of the same name and its REALLY easy to tell by the way its structured/framing that these were visualised for TV as well as its grand generalising statements)

(Feel free to ignore the rest Im just writing down my thoughts)

I picked it up cos I’m listening to the History of English Podcast and was like hang on WHO were there before the celts (like i vaguely knew stonehenge predated the celts but not much more) so its helping fit together the timeline. Though now I need to go back and research when the fertile crescent / Mesopotamia /Sumer  period was and how it all fits in (also who was on contential Europe before the PIE speaking tribes got there?? tell me more about these Bell beaker and corded wear people please)

I have learnt a few things - ie that humans were in Britian possibly 500,000 years ago but they weren’t modern humans and that there were waves of occupations that were wiped out by ice ages and it wasn’t til about 13,000 years ago modern humans occupied Britain (with Neanderthals and then both got pushed back by yet another ice age and the current occupation is approx 11,000 years old iirc)

I had completely forgot pre modern humans would be part of the story and now I need to go back and research all of THAT business. there were so many homo species what happened?!

and i can’t help but compare the timescales to Indigenous Australian who’s longevity on this continent may well break the modern out of Africa theory (well push the dates back) if yet older sites keep being discovered. THERE A SITE IN VICTORIA THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE OVER 100,000 YEARS OLD and like its well accepted to say they’ve been here for 60-80,000 years ago.

I’m not sure how that compares to human occupation of continental Europe but like damn thats easily 10 times longer than the current occupation stretch of Britain which isnt culturally continuous thats thousands of generations telling the same stories etc etc

Anyway getting back to complaints theres a LOT of grand statements, and unnecessarily poetic descriptions of the ice age. eg we still have the muscle memory of holding stone age hand axes 🙄

I also grit my teeth every time he says these people were primitive or simple. He also goes on a rant about how ugly Neanderthals were and how there couldnt possibly be any inbreeding between modern humans and them, which HA! (book was published 2011) Goes to show I am totally justified to be skeptical of the bits that are obviously his OpinionTM (he is generally ok at being like I have a theory... (that this bible story is a memory of when modern humans shared the earth with Neanderthals) )

I'm reading a book about ancient Britian which is interesting but FFS I wish the author would stop with the referencing to deep/big history and philosophical framing "time didn't exist until humans were there to witness it" humans are the only species that know we will die "it would have no negative effects on plants and animals if all humans just died out" humans are the only creatures to morn

those last two are definitely BULLSHIT and you can't 'prove' the others

and then goes on a tangent narrowly avoiding enlightenment scientists idiots for being reglious while also claiming a lot of them were the first to discover something and implying it could only have ever been that genius to think of it

and then hats off for wondering why humans stopped telling the story of the iceage to their descendants a sentence after mentioning the Noah's Ark story (also some Indigenous Australians groups DID pass down those stories)

I want the chronology of ancient Britian not the story of the people who dug it up (ok fine it could be a good framing but it's getting tedius)

[adugalm]

Studio 12: When the WolfGang Let’s You Down

THERE WAS A UNITY ERROR THAT I COULDN’T FIX FOR DAYS AND THE GAME WOULDN’T BUILD;

guys just need to share a frustration i have been deterred from doing this project for the last week bc i left it alone for like 4 days and suddenly a script in the custom text asset just started fucking up and i couldnt build the game or run it and ive been googling debugs and doing shit for the last 3 days but nothings come up which is so bizarre bc its the most popular text asset out????? anyway i redownloaded the asset for like the 5th time today and for whatever reason was looking thru the folder directory to see if it was duplicated or something and when i searched the file name it was sitting in some other random unrelated folder and i just deleted it and the game ran perfectly i cannot express how relieved but also fucking angry i am im literally shaking in anger and pain and suffering anyway that is my rant for the night thank u for listening

- me, to my group chat

Finally finished the game till Thursday, of which I’ve been waiting on assets: a  very annoying thing considering the fact that I’ll be the one compiling this whole thing the day before. Joachim also completed Bjorn’s song for Friday, although I can’t do much with this since there isn’t anything to build around.

Spent my huge amount of free time code cleaning; hid a lot of redundant variables from inspector codes since most of the scenes’ objects were built from self-referential prefabs anyway.

Updated the Pause menu prefab by implementing the previous script manager located on the Main Camera to be under it’s parent object. This would ensure continuity and make the prefab drag and drop a whole lot easier.

Integrated Pause into all story mode scenes which I realised was needed after having to sit through a ridiculously long dialogue sequence.

Attempted to add a skip dialogue function but ended up running into problems as the code runs on a float max 1 timescale, meaning that ‘halving’ or ‘accelerating’ time - much less coroutines - messes a lot of things up.

Anna finished cutting and painting the wood which should hopefully be ready for building soon.

I have no idea what Michaela is doing but it sure as hell isn’t producing enough content for me.

-m

[sunshineweb]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[heliosfinance]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

[sunshineweb]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[heliosfinance]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

[heliosfinance]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

[sunshineweb]

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning

If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, then here’s a quick introduction. He’s a billionaire and he’s 93 years old. He’s not the oldest and he is not the wealthiest but when it comes to being the “oldest billionaire”, he doesn’t have any competition.

In other words, he has the two most coveted things in this world – wealth and a long life.

His advice to us – minimize stupidity. Remarkably simple, isn’t it?

The most effective way to follow Charlie’s advice is to learn from others’ mistakes. That’s where books come into the picture. They’re the best source of vicarious knowledge.

When humans first discovered that they could persist their words and other information in physical form, it was revolutionary. According to some historians, between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, ancient Sumerians from Mesopotamia civilization invented the first system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

In the timescale of millions of years of human evolution, this invention is pretty recent one. Irrespective of how trivial the ability to read/write sounds, it was nothing less than a disrupting technology when it came out. Probably thousands of talented Sumerians, who were employed for memorizing information, lost their jobs.

You don’t have to teach an infant how to swallow liquid or give walking lessons to a toddler. These skills are built into the human genome. But reading isn’t part of our DNA.

The point I am coming to is this: the human brain isn’t naturally built to read. It’s an acquired skill like driving or playing Tennis. Reading involves vision which engages a certain part of the brain which in turn exercises a specific section of our neural machinery.

Although our brain processes signal received from all senses, each of the five senses is wired to different sections of the brain. Which means, reading lights up only the visual component of our brain’s circuitry.

When the brain receives the same information from different senses, it processes them slightly differently. And the interpretation changes based on which instrument (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) was used to record the information.

Eyes usually get preference over others. McGurk Effect is the proof that our brain gives different weightage to each sense organ.

What would happen if you could involve multiple senses to absorb knowledge?

For one, our brain would frequently run into conflicts. Eyes would tell one story and the ears will say something else. But that’s not a bad news. Fortunately, unusual insights are almost always preceded by conflicts.

So I would like to argue that to learn better, one should be open to the idea of absorbing knowledge through multiple senses.

Making use of multiple senses fires up neurons in different locations inside our brain. This creates the possibility of fresh connections between previously unrelated brain cells. These unprecedented linkages enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate brand new insights.

Guy Spier, in his book The Education of Value Investor, mentions that someone gifted him an audio CD of Charlie Munger’s talk at Harvard on the 24 standard causes of human misjudgment. And there was an 18-month period, writes Guy, “during which this was the only CD in my car’s entertainment system.”

Guy probably listened to Charlie’s talk hundreds of times.

So to experiment with this idea, I have been trying to learn through my ears. One way to do that is to listen to the audiobooks. For that, I subscribed to Audible and listened to quite a few audiobooks.

My experience with audiobooks led me to the conclusion that listening to biographies and fiction is quite enjoyable. And there are again evolutionary reasons behind it.

If you recall our earlier discussion in this post, the technology of writing and reading came into existence quite late in the history of human evolution. The human brain hasn’t yet adapted naturally to the idea of learning things by reading. However, for millions of years, the knowledge was transferred from one person to another by narrating stories. So sound was the primary mode of sharing and propagating information for the majority of human history.

Which confirms my personal observation about my inability to absorb any information in audio form if the content is not in a story format.

The human brain started comprehending complex matters precisely because of the invention of the written word. We learn to do complex algebra and calculus in school because the process involves delegating all the steps to paper. If you had to do it all in your head, it would be impossible. Our brains aren’t wired to do that.

But the idea of podcasts has kind of broken this barrier. For some strange reason, our mind would find it extremely entertaining and engrossing when it’s privy to a conversation between two fellow humans.

A monologue, when it’s not a story, is boring. On the other hand, listening to a dialogue, even if the topic is fairly complex, isn’t that taxing to the mind. Maybe that’s the reason podcasts are rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity as a very effective medium to share knowledge.

For past one year, I have been listening to podcasts. I have learned a lot. It feels as if two wise people are sitting behind you and informally discussing their experiences. I find it fascinating.

So I thought of sharing the podcasts that I regularly listen to. I am also including some of my favourite episodes of each to get you started.

1. How I Built This

It’s a show hosted by Guy Raz. In his words, “How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” Unlike many other podcasts, the length of each episode is relatively short i.e. 30-40 minutes. My favorite stories in this podcasts are –

Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airline. Airlines is an industry marred by abysmally poor economics. In its entire history, on the whole, the airline industry has destroyed shareholder wealth. Southwest is the only airline in the world which has remained profitable for an almost entire period of its 40+ years of operation.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, which was bought for a billion dollar by Amazon. After listening to this conversation, I picked up Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and enjoyed reading it.

Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5-hour energy. This guy lived as a monk for 13 years and then went on to create a billion-dollar business in less than a decade. He’s now devoting a majority of his time for tackling the hardest problems our world is facing like bringing electricity to those who don’t have it yet, converting seawater to freshwater and a few more.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Amazon acquires a company only when Jeff Bezos realizes that he can’t replicate what the acquiree is doing which speaks a ton about what John Mackey has accomplished.

Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb. Today Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry. Airbnb has now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.

2. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has been relentlessly sharing multidisciplinary ideas on his blog for almost a decade. The knowledge project podcast is another feather in his cap. The publishing schedule is quite infrequent and irregular, nevertheless, there’s enough wisdom here to keep you busy for weeks. My favourite episodes are –

Interview with Sanjay Bakshi. Being a Safal Niveshak tribesman, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t heard of Prof. Bakshi. He teaches a course on behavioural finance and business valuation in MDI Gurgaon, a prestigious MBA college. There’s chock full of investing wisdom in this interview. I recommend that you listen to it multiple times.

Interview with Naval Ravikant. Naval is the co-founder of AngelList. He’s been an investor in many unicorn startups including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. This 2+ hours of conversation between Shane and Naval was simply out of the world. I have already listened to this one twice and want to listen to it again few more times. Naval has been interviewed in Tim Ferriss show also and that conversation was equally amazing.

Interview with Morgan Housel. I became a fan of  Morgan Housel when I first read his incisive posts at Collaborative Fund’s blog. I have read, at least twice, every single article that he’s written in last one year. He’s perhaps one of the best investment journalists out there. His insights on investing and business are truly jaw-dropping. When I start reading his posts, I always sit tight in my chair lest the Eureka moment throws me off on the ground.

3. The Tim Ferriss Show

Before I tell you what I like about this podcast, let me be honest about two things that I don’t like in this one. First is the excessive promotional content in each episode (from financial products to undergarments) which isn’t really wrong or unethical but a big put off for a new listener. Second, a lot of episodes aren’t interviews but random ranting from Tim which kind of dilutes my original purpose of listening to a podcast i.e. being privy to a dialogue, not a monologue. So if you can get past these two small irritants then there’s quite a bit of wisdom to be gained from Tim’s show. Here are few of the episodes which I liked –

Interview with Derek Sivers. Sivers is a fascinating personality. He was a musician who accidentally created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby. He later sold the company for USD 22 million and gave away the money to a trust dedicated to musicians. I loved Sivers’ book Anything You Want and go back to all his TED talks again and again. There are actually two episodes with Derek Sivers. Like Scott Adams, Sivers has spoken to James Altucher also.

Interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. Thiel has written a book called Zero to One which mind stretching insights about future. He’s a true contrarian and he starts every decision by asking, “What important truth that I know which most people disagree with me on this one.” A fascinating conversation. Thiel interviewed with James Altucher also, so do check out that episode also.

4. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a prolific blogger and podcaster. His podcast has already crossed 250 episodes and his guest list is pretty awesome. James’ book Choose Yourself had a profound impact on how I think and it’s a book that I recommend very frequently. Here are my picks from Altucher’s show –

Interview with Yuval Noah Harari who shot into limelight with his book Sapiens when it was recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. I have read Sapiens twice already and, ignoring my bias about non-narrative audiobooks, have listened to the audio version also, more than once. Harari is an outstanding thinker and a gifted writer. I challenge you that once you read Sapiens, two things will happen to you. One, you will immediately want to read it again and you won’t be able to see the world with the same eyes as you do now. His second book Homo Deus is equally fascinating.

Scott Adams is the creator of famous cartoon strip Dilbert. Adams’ story is a remarkable tale of series of lifelong experiments that he undertook to tilt the odds of success in his favour. He consciously pursued a strategy which eventually catapulted him to wealth and world fame. His insights on the science of persuasion are just out of this world. Scott Adams has appeared in Tim Ferriss show also. I loved Scott’s two books – How To Fail… and Win Bigly.

5. Masters In Business

Barry Ritholtz hosts this show. The archive contains more than 100 episodes but I have just started listening to this podcast.

The first one which I listened was a conversation with Marc Andreessen, creator of first internet browser Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Marc is also the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It’s was a fascinating dialogue. The breadth and depth of Marc’s knowledge about how the world works are truly remarkable.

Vishal shares that a few other wonderful podcasts from this series includes the ones with Ed Thorp, Howard Marks, and Michael Lewis.

A couple of Indian podcasts around investing we like are the ones from Stoic Podcast and Shyam Sekhar. Lastly, don’t miss Vishal’s recent interview on a podcast.

I use a podcast aggregation app (Podcast Addict, on Android) to subscribe to these podcasts. There are many other similar apps which you can use. I find Podcast Addict quite good because it has useful features like playback speeds (slowing down or speeding up), bookmarking, adding notes, skipping, downloading for offline consumption, creating playlists etc.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to make use of your commute/travel time especially if you use public transport or taxi. I call this mode of learning – university on wheels.

I hope you’ll try out this mode of learning and if you’ve already been doing it, I would love to know about your podcasts list.

Take care and keep learning.

The post What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

What We Are Listening To: Our Favourite Podcasts on Business, Investing, and Learning published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/