Pods & Recs: What I Learned in 2019

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Some of the most interesting things I learned by listening to podcast episodes are below. I hope you enjoy!

Random Facts

1. If a doctor doesn’t think of a diagnosis for a patient within the first 5 minutes, they have over a 70% error rate. [a16z Podcast]
2. In 2008, the Russians dropped a bunch of USB keys in parking lots around American bases in the Middle East. Americans would pick them up and put them in their computers at work, which got Russians inside the Pentagons’ secret network, and were able get out of the Pentagon some of its most secret communications. People have since superglued the USB ports on Pentagon computers to avoid this in the future. [The Daily]
3. There are more payday lenders than McDonalds in the U.S.(>18,000). [The Indicator from Planet Money]
4. 26%: The number of U.S. 16 year-olds that are now getting their driver’s licenses, which was nearly 44% twenty years ago.[Exchanges at Goldman Sachs]
5. Law school enrollment is down 29% since 2010. [The Indicator from Planet Money]
6. The top 3% of YouTube creators make 97% of all of the advertising revenue on the platform.[This Week in Startups with Steven Galanis]
7. It’s only been a few hundred years since the prevailing science said women going to college would atrophy their reproductive organs. [Standard Deviations with Jim O’Shaughnessy]
8. The reason so many restaurants created a breakfast menu is because in order to have a location in an airport, you have to serve breakfast. [Talking Points with Danny Meyer]
9. It was illegal to use the internet for commercial transactions until 1993. [a16z Podcast]
10. The United Nations estimates that at this rate, by 2030 there won’t be anyone in the world who’s living below the current poverty level. [The Jordan Peterson Podcast with Steven Pinker]
11. 50% of medications aren’t picked up from a pharmacy or taken properly, resulting in a loss of 120,000 lives annually. [This Week in Startups with Mattiew Gamache-Asselin]
12. We are estimated to spend 7,000 hours (6 months of our lives) waiting in line. [The Happiness Lab]
13. A LinkedIn study that looked at 500,000 profiles and determined the #1 factor that you can control that would help you get to the C-suite level was the number of different levels they worked across their respective industry. [The Learning Leader with David Epstein]
14. If a mother is under great stress, her child can see something in her face that will imprint epigenetically into the child that alters features about them as they age, such as their propensity to be depressed. [The Peter Attia Drive with Robert Sapolsky]
15. Based on the Harvard Medical School Grant Study, which was the largest study on happiness, tracking 300 19-year-old men for 75 years and looking at what factors made them less or more happy, the number one thing that predicted unhappiness was the presence of alcohol in their life. [Masters in Business with Scott Galloway]
16. Over the last decade, our biggest cities have accounted for over 70% of US job growth. [Planet Money]
17. Amazon’s name was originally going to be Relentless (to this day, visiting www.relentless.com re-directs you to www.amazon.com). [Making a Killing with Bethany McLean]
18. When you sleep 6 hours or less, your body holds onto its fat and 70% of the weight you lose comes from lean muscle mass. [The Peter Attia Drive with Matthew Walker]
19. If a firm operates in what the industry calls a complex and hostile territory, the firm has an option to buy kidnap insurance for their employees. However, they must not tell their employees they’ve done so. [EconTalk with Anja Shortland]
20. Over 30% of scans read today by human radiologists have a false negative (they miss something). [EconTalk with Eric Topol]
21. 1/7 people in the world don’t have any identification (no birth certificate, social security card, drivers license, etc.). [The Indicator from Planet Money]
22. 5% of kids will lose a parent before they’re 15 years old. 70% of that, if they lost the breadwinning parent, would end up bankrupt within 3 months. [This Week in Startups with Peter Colis]
23. In Ontario, Canada, it is illegal to leave a child under the age of 16 unsupervised. [The Knowledge Project with Jonathan Haidt]
24. Today, over 90% of e-commerce orders are bought with free delivery. [Exchanges at Goldman Sachs]
25. From 1999–2010, opioid prescriptions quadrupled and overdose deaths from prescription opioids also quadrupled (perfect trendline match). [Fresh Air with Travis Rieder]
26. 25% of kids arrive on college campuses today on prescription psychoactive medication. [Fresh Air]
27. 34% of employees in the U.S. say they are engaged at work, which compares great to countries like India and China where engagement is in the single-digits (around 6%). [The Learning Leader with Jim Clifton]
28. The average American takes 5x as much information every day today as we did in 1989, which is the equivalent of reading 175 newspapers from cover-to-cover. [CFA Take 15]
29. GDP per capita around the world vs. self reported well being has an R² of 0.68. [EconTalk with Patrick Collison]
30. The walkability of whatever zip code you live in Toronto predicted who gained how much weight over a 10–20 year span. [Freakonomics]
31. We now create as much information every two days as we did the previous 2,000 years. [Standard Deviations with Bob Seawright]
32. The three jobs that have been said to be most resilient to artificial intelligence are gardener, legislator, and psychotherapist.[Invest Like The Best with Brian Christian]
33. Among people 18–34, 10x as many people live alone today compared to 1950. [Hidden Brain]
34. In Germany, 60% of the people under 30 years old have experience some sort of artisanal or vocational training; in the U.S. it is around 6%.[Pivot]
35. The three countries in the world that are the happiest (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are also the countries that have the highest suicide rates. [Masters in Business with Danny Blanchflower]

Finance Facts

1. Branch, a company making personal loans to undeveloped countries where credit scores don’t exist, used AI to learn if someone has gambling apps on their phone, it indicates they are a better credit risk. [Twenty Minute VC with Frank Chen]
2. 40% of all VC money is going to advertising on Google and Facebook. [North Star Podcast with Andrew D’Souza]
3. The Bank of Japan owns 77% of every ETF in Japan and are a top 10 holder in four of the largest companies in Japan. [Off the Chain with Kyle Bass]
4. Short-term rentals increase property values; when you double the number of AirBnb’s in a city, property values increase by 6–13%. [Planet Money]
5. People lose 13% of their IQ when they are under financial stress. [Stansberry Investor Hour with Daniel Crosby]
6. 50 years ago, 84% of all assets were held in taxable accounts. Today, that number is down to 24%. [Animal Spirits with Jeremy Schwartz]
7. Employees withdraw roughly 40 cents of every dollar from their 401(k) (over time) before retirement. A Boston College study said that as a result, retirement savings is 25% less, in aggregate, than it would be given the fact that people prematurely raid their 401(k)’s. [WSJ Your Money Briefing]
8. Robert Shiller has showed that market prices are 20x more volatile than fundamentals. [The Acquirers Podcast with Dan Rasmussen]
9. As of May 2019, there had been 63 months of consecutive positive net inflows into ETFs globally, while mutual funds and hedge funds have had net outflows over the same time period. [Bogleheads on Investing with Debbie Fuhr and Robin Powell]
10. Per Credit Suisse, large companies (>$10B in revenues) with women on their boards outperform companies with no women on their boards by 26%. [Something Ventured with Michael Tchong]
11. Due to being too emotional and over-trading, retail investors on average lose on the order of 2% a year of their returns relative to the broad markets. Institutional investors, after fees and expenses, generally earn market returns. [Masters in Business with Chris Brightman]
12. Warren Buffett has 80% of his portfolio in 10 ideas, 62% in 5 ideas, and one position with a 22% weight. [Flirting with Models with Jason Thompson]
13. The fourth worst drawdown for the value factor since 1929 was from 2018-May 2019. [Masters in Business with Andrew Ang]
14. A study that looked at all the stocks in the Russell 2000 from 1983–2007 (8,000 total over that time) found that the bottom 75% of stocks collectively had a 0% return over the 24 year period. [Latticework Podcast]
15. If you invested in the biggest company (by market cap), it would under perform the broad market by 3% per year for the next decade. [Resolve’s Gestalt University with Meb Faber]
16. If you have an ETF that trades 1 share a day, but if the underlying basket trades $1 billion of notional a day, you can put $10 million into that ETF and not move it by a penny. [Animal Spirits]
17. The top three countries (China, Korea, and Taiwan) account for nearly 60% of the emerging markets index, and the top five countries account for 75% of the index. [Behind the Markets with Ruchir Sharma]
18. The average interest rate on a new loan Japanese regional banks YTD is 68bps, so on current business, Japanese banks are loss making before credit losses. [Odd Lots with John Hempton]
19. 10 years ago, the combined public market capitalization of bottom up, user led enterprise software was $0. It’s now over $100 billion. [North Star Podcast with Tren Griffin]
20. In 2009, the Kauffman Foundation released a study showing that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies were founded during a recession or bear market. [The ETF Experience with Morgan Housel]

Sports Facts

1. When Pat Riley won the championship with the Miami Heat, he pulled out all his Lakers rings so he could tell the ring designer what he liked and disliked. The designer brought out a bunch of prototypes for them to look at, and they mistakenly put all his Lakers rings back in the boxes with the prototypes, and they threw the boxes away. He has never found them. [The Bill Simmons Podcast with Jackie MacMullan]
2. Rob Gronkowski has never spent any contract money he earned from the Patriots during his career — he has lived off of money he’s made from endorsements. [Kneading Dough with Rob Gronkowski]
3. 29/32 players in the first round of the 2017 NFL draft played multiple sports in high school. [The Learning Leader with David Epstein]
4. Bill Belichick has 261 wins, and has a higher playoff winning percentage (~75%) than in the regular season. [The GM Shuffle with Michael Lombardi and Adnan Virk]
5. When Sam Cassell was an assistant for the Washington Wizards, the team had a younger player who was playing his way out of the league. There was a game when he did poorly, and when he came out of the game complaining, Cassell yelled “Rosetta Stone” at him. No one on the bench understood what that meant — Cassell responded saying it was because he would soon be playing overseas and not of the NBA anymore. [The Lowe Post with Ryan Saunders]
6. When Ryan Saunders was 16 and his Dad was the head coach for the Timberwolves, he rebounded for Kevin Garnett before and after practices. As a thank you, Garnett tried to give Ryan a green Porsche, until his father said he wasn’t allowed to take it. [The Lowe Post with Ryan Saunders]
7. India has the most people participating in fantasy sports (100 million people play fantasy sports in India compared to 60 million in the U.S. and Canada). [Freakonomics]
8. A study that looked at the faces of gold, silver, and bronze medal winners at the Olympics and scored them based on looking like they were in agony (1) or ecstasy (10). Bronze medal winners scored a 7.1, while silver medal winners scored a 4.8. Second place finishers were most miserable, indicating they felt their Silver medal wasn’t an achievement but rather a sign of failure because they weren’t first. [The Happiness Lab]
9. When Benji Wilson, who was the #1 high school basketball player in the nation in 1984, was shot, the law required he be taken to the nearest hospital, regardless of if it had a trauma center, which as a result did not provide adequate care and he died. Afterwards, the law was changed and stated a person be taken to the nearest trauma center, which saved countless lives. [30 for 30 Podcasts]
10. Data shows the first couple days of NFL training camps is when players get injured the most. [The Ringer NFL Show]