Shows
BacktestThe Shale Revolution: George Mitchell’s Natural Gas Moonshot (Part 1)George Mitchell and his team—people like Nick Steinsberger—through relentless experimentation and financial pressure targeted natural gas in the Barnett Shale and unlocked generations of US energy supply. The question was less, “is the gas there?” and more “can it be produced economically?”By answering that question they changed the US natural gas market, global geopolitics, and the daily life of everyday Americans.In this episode we tell the story of George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants who clawed his way from financial hardship in Galveston to build a multi-billion dollar energy business—first by using...
2025-11-251h 11
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk Walk into the Fire and Create PayPal (Part 4)Imagine starting a company to change the world of finance right before an epic stock market crash.Elon Musk famously said that PayPal wasn’t a hard company to create. It was a hard company to keep alive.In 1999, three future titans of technology—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—charge straight into the blaze to bring payments and finance into the internet age. This is the story of how a handful of brilliant founders and their team navigate from crisis to crisis, face constant near-failure, and create the first successful internet payments solution. From t...
2025-10-3058 min
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Bezos Sees the Wave, Rides the Crest, Survives the Crash (Part 3)Technology waves are easy to see in hindsight, but often hard to see before they arrive. It’s even harder to build enough conviction to take a risk, ride the wave, and build something great.Jeff Bezos did just that. And while the Amazon story has been told many times, it’s fascinating to think about what he saw that gave him the confidence to leave his comfortable Wall Street job to start Amazon.How did he see the wave before most people, and what gave him the conviction to go for it? We cover his...
2025-10-1759 min
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: A Tale of Two Telecoms (Part 2)In the late 1990s, the internet grew exponentially to become an enormous engine for technological progress and economic disruption.The existing telecommunications infrastructure was designed to carry voice and television signals—not data packets. The system needed billions of dollars in fiber and copper to support the tidal wave. Telecom entrepreneurs, incumbent executives and capital markets were eager to invest capital and ride the boom.In this episode, we tell the parallel rise (and unraveling) of two giants who tried to wire the future from opposite ends of the network.On one side: Jo...
2025-10-071h 01
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Netscape Lights the Fuse (Part 1)DescriptionGold-rush energy meets browser wars.In mid-1994 Silicon Graphics legend Jim Clark sits down with a 22-year-old programmer Marc Andreessen in the heart of Silicon Valley. Clark, a rebellious hardware icon trying to reinvent himself, and Andreessen, fresh off building the first web browser, bet that the browser will be the operating system to the open web.Their new company races from zero to market share dominance, forcing Microsoft’s “tidal wave” pivot. They turn their IPO into a marketing weapon on August 5, 1995 when Netscape goes public without profits—and the stock soars—se...
2025-09-2658 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: Connally’s Bold Move (Part 3)A run on the dollar, stagflation, and an election on the line—Part 3 wraps up the series with President Nixon’s shocking announcement to shut the gold window… a move that changed the monetary system forever and signaled the beginning of the end for the perception of gold as money. We meet John Connally, the swaggering Democratic governor of Texas who rode in the car with JFK when he was shot, and later became Nixon’s Treasury Secretary. He was the political closer tasked with averting a global monetary crisis and more importantly, securing Nixon’s re-election in 1972.In the s...
2025-08-2157 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: Martin’s Fed vs. The World (Part 2)On the journey towards President Nixon’s fateful decision on August 15th, 1971 to suspend dollar-gold convertibility—a decision that would forever change the global economy—we meet William McChesney Martin Jr, the longest-serving Fed chairman in history and arguably the most consequential economic US policy maker since Alexander Hamilton.After negotiating Fed independence as an Assistant Treasury Secretary with the 1951 Fed-Treasury Accord, President Truman appointed Martin as chairman of the Fed. For two decades, Martin fought to establish Fed independence while pursuing the long-term interests of the US—fighting inflation, defending the dollar, and facing off against five pre...
2025-08-1459 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: The Golden Rule at Bretton Woods (Part 1)Gold, power, war, and spies—this series has it all. On August 15th 1971, President Nixon announced that he was suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold. This announcement upended the Bretton Woods monetary system and set the world on a course towards floating exchange rates with the US dollar as a fiat reserve currency for world trade—a system that is under significant pressure today.In the first episode of the series, we tell the story of how an ambitious, little-known American technocrat—Harry Dexter White—went toe-to-toe with the world-famous John Maynard Keynes to rewrite the rules of g...
2025-08-0757 min
BacktestPILOT - The Global Financial Crisis: The Banking Crisis (Part 2)In Part 2: The Banking Crisis, we pick up where Part 1: The Housing Bubble leaves off—with financial institutions all over the world holding mortgage-backed securities as housing prices start to collapse at the end of 2006.In this episode, we tell the story of a financial system that became addicted to mortgage products and complacent about their risk.We cover the basics of banking—how short-term funding and long-term lending creates fragility in normal times, and outright panic in a crisis. We explore how credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and the repo market works—and how th...
2025-05-311h 40
BacktestPILOT - The Global Financial Crisis: The Housing Bubble (Part 1)In this episode, we tell the story of the modern mortgage market, how Wall Street financialized it, and how easy credit inflated one of the biggest bubbles in American history. A bubble that, when it finally popped, nearly brought down the entire global financial system.The housing bubble left scars, changed institutions, and shaped the economy we live in today. It’s impossible to understand the social and economic forces in the 2010s and 2020s without first studying the Global Financial Crisis. At the root of the crisis was a nation-wide housing bubble.In Part 1 of...
2025-05-191h 40
BacktestARCHIVE: Backtest Pilot—The Dot-Com Bubble (see new dot-com series starting with Episode 6: Netscape Lights the Fuse)Quick heads-up: this was our very first episode. We’ve gotten much better since publishing this. If you’re new or looking for the best way to learn about the Dot-Com market cycle, start with The Dot Com Boom: Netscape Lights the Fuse (Part 1). If you’re just exploring our origin story, by all means listen here.—In the 1990s, the personal computer and the internet combined to transform the global economy. The dot-com boom built on the promise of the World Wide Web led to one of the longest economic expansions on record. From the Nets...
2025-03-272h 04