Read and Think: Recent Episodes
James Petzke
I’ve learned in my career as an entrepreneur and investor that the more I read, the better I think, which leads to better decisions and better outcomes. On Read and Think I talk about the lessons I’m learning from the books I’m reading and how I’m applying them to my life.
Tom Nichols book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters might seem like a preachy/complainy rant by a professor who wishes his students took him more seriously on the surface. But if you give it a chance, it very clearly explains many of the biggest issues at the heart of events in the US in recent years. It's a shockingly important book that I would recommend to anyone interested in current events and in understanding why people behave the ways they do. This episode talks about my favorite insights from the book.
Behavioral economics is one of the most fascinating and useful subjects to study in my opinion. The authors of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement are some of most celebrated researchers in that arena. This book however deals with a different problem in systems created by humans. Noise is more statistical in some ways than behavioral, but it creates all kinds of problems whenever there is a human being making judgements. What happens when teachers grade papers or judges make rulings that aren't always consistent, and how can we stop that? Listen to this episode to find out!
I don't agree with a lot of the policies that Barack Obama championed when he was President of the United States, but I have an tremendous amount of respect for him and learned a lot by reading this first of a two part memoir series. I found his early story very interesting and impressive, as he climbed up from his unique childhood to the highest office in the free world. The stories he shares of his first few years in office provide a new lens on some of the biggest issues that faced the world during a global financial crisis, and also insight into the process of passing his controversial healthcare reform law without bipartisan support, which immediately became a rallying cry for Republicans.
Amazon is the defining company of a generation maybe more than any other. Amazon Unbound, the second on the company by Brad Stone, covers their rise from a small eCommerce company in the early 2010's to the dominant conglomerate they are today. It talks about the strategies Amazon used to dominate everything from home voice recognition to international eCommerce to Hollywood, and it even covers some of the drama around Jeff Bezos' personal life. In this episode I talk about everything I learned from this book and what I'm applying from it to my own Amazon businesses.
William Borah, the Lion of Idaho, is probably Idaho's most well known and important historic figure. He was a United States Senator for 33 years, and was involved in many of the most important discussions of the United States during the early 1900s. He was a noted isolationist, playing a big role is shutting down the League of Nations. He was known as a progressive Republican, and was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, but also struck out on his own and took principled stances that often weren't popular. I read a biography about him written almost 90 years ago. This episode is a discussion of his life and what he did both for the people of Idaho and the United States as a whole.
Capitalism in America: A History, by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Woolridge, is exactly what it sounds like: an in depth look at the history of America's economy from the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and an acclaimed historian. This book is fantastic for learning about how our economy was built over the years, what missteps the government took at different times, and getting historical perspective on current issues. This episode covers the lessons learned from reading the book.
If you want to study decision making, there may be no better way than reading books about and by presidents. George Bush wrote Decision Points right after his second term in office came to a close, and its a look back at his whole life with a special focus on the key decisions he made in office. He is pretty candid about what he did wrong and what he did right, and takes strong positions on the most controversial parts of his presidency. In this episode I talk about the many things I learned from this fascinating memoir.
Are you concerned about inflation speeding up in our economy right now? I definitely am, and so I decided to read a few books about the history of inflation in our economy. Getting a historical context for economic forces helps me prepare for what could happen in the future. It won't be an exact roadmap, but I like to at least get some knowledge about the possibilities. The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath is a great book covering the biggest inflationary period we've had in American history, which happened in the 70s and 80s and was driven by government actions. This episode covers the lessons I learned from the book and how I'm thinking about inflation going forward.
Skin in the Game, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is as thought provoking as anything you've read or heard from that writer/philosopher. It's central tenant is the concept of having skin in the game, meaning an exposure to both the positive and negative consequences of your actions in the real world. He argues that we should set up systems (meaning governments, companies, and even for ourselves) that put the maximum amount of skin in the game possible in order to get the best outcomes and prevent asymmetries. An example of a lack of skin in the game were bankers who collected massive bonuses leading up to the recession in 2008 but didn't lose anything in the crash. In this episode I talk about many of my favorite parts of this interesting book.
Of Wolves and Men, by Barry Lopez, is all about human's interactions with wolves. But it's also about the power of stories, and how narratives can shape the way we interact with the world and the things that happen at the highest levels of human society. This book did a great job giving an unbiased and honest look at both the good that wolves do for an ecosystem and their natural place in the wild, and the harm that they sometimes do to humans in the form of killing livestock. It then talked about how wolves were systematically killed off in large part because of fear in Europe and North America. In this episode I also talk about my views on wolves as a hunter and in light of Idaho's ongoing wolf debate.
Decision making is easily one of my favorite topics to learn about. After all, outcomes are just a combination of decision making and luck, and you can only control the decisions you make. Becoming better at decision making has made me a much better entrepreneur and investor. The book I'm talking about in this episode is Annie Duke's How to Decide. It is all about having a framework for decision making. Those who have gone through formal business schooling will recognize the framework she teaches as a simplified version of Expected Value (EV).
If you haven't heard of the book The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, you need to pick it up. This book immediately became my go to recommendation for personal finance books. Considering that I've read and recommended several dozen great ones on the subject, that is quite the shift for me. But this book deserves that kind of praise. The premise behind the book (and my discussion of it in this episode) is that being successful with money has very little to do with how smart you are, and a lot to do with how you behave.
I've lived in Idaho virtually my entire life, but I'd never really learned much about its history until I read two books: Idaho - A Bicentennial History, and Idaho's Place. These two books, recommended by our State Historian, taught me a lot about the state I've called home since I was two years old! Idaho is one of the crazy success stories of the last few decades, seeing unrivaled growth and development while still maintaining it's incredible natural beauty. Whether you live here or not, there is something to be learned from the story of the gem state.
This episode is all about the book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. In this book, Gates outlines the idea of green premiums (the added cost of making a greenhouse gas emitter have no emissions), and the various technologies that might help us decrease those premiums so we can avoid the problems of massive climate change.
In this episode I talk about the book The Last Lion: Visions of Glory by William Manchester. This books is a biography of the first 58 years of Winston Churchill's life, and covers his schooling, early writing career, service as a war correspondent during several wars, his early political career and rise to political stardom, his service during World War 1 and the time immediately following it. There are two more books in this series that I will be reading and doing episodes on soon!
This episode is all about the book Think Again by Adam Grant. This books talks about the power of knowing what you don't know, being intellectually humble, being humble in our viewpoints and opinions, how to have productive conversations with others when we don't agree on controversial topics, and so many other great subjects. In this show I talk about what I learned from the book and how I'm applying it to my life and businesses and investing strategies.
In this introduction episode, I go over everything you need to know about the Read and Think Podcast and why you should listen to it. I talk about who I am, my background as a successful entrepreneur and investor, how and why I read books, what types of books I read, how I track them, why I decided to start this podcast, the value you'll get out of it, and give a brief overview of the first few episodes.