Liberty's Highlights

About Liberty's Highlights

Exploration-as-a-Service: finding what matters in business, technology, culture, incentives, and human judgment. www.libertyrpf.com (https://www.libertyrpf.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Liberty

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 May 2021

Latest episode

29 May 2026

Latest episodes

5 of 36 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   29 May 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Project Hail Mary Explained: Book vs Movie (Spoilers, Science & Why Rocky Works) 🧑‍🚀🚀⭐🦠🪨

   Host Liberty is joined by author Tinkered Thinking and host Jameson Olsen to dissect the science, characters, and adaptation of Project Hail Mary from book to film.

2. 

   27 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT

   A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Going Deep with Tinkered Thinking and Jameson Olsen ⚔️🥚🛡️🏰🐴

   I recruited my friends Tinkered Thinking (https://tinkeredthinking.com/) (✍️📚 author of White Mirror (https://www.libertyrpf.com/p/white-mirror-31-stories-a-1000-puzzle) & The Lucilius Parables (https://tinkeredthinking.com/bookstore/)) and Jameson Olsen (https://x.com/Jameson_Olsen) (🎧 host of Becoming the Main Character (https://www.becomingmain.com/)) to do a *deep* dive on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27497448/), HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's 1998 novella The Hedge Knight (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11970747-the-hedge-knight). 🚨 If you haven’t seen the show, bookmark this and come back. Seriously. This one’s worth avoiding spoilers and going in blind. 🚨 I was totally charmed by this series. The writing, the acting, the music, the cinematography, the sets, and the costumes. It all feels more tactile and real than most of what's on TV right now. And here's the thing: after we watched it, we all read the novella, and we all agree the show might actually be better. That almost never happens with adaptations. In this pod, we go episode by episode, compare the novella to the show, and argue about what we want from season two. Along the way, we get into trailers that ruin movies, what makes a great villain entrance (hint: it involves a horse 🐴), the philosophy of praxis, David Goggins taking souls, and why Dunk might be one of the most lovable protagonists on television right now, despite being “thick as a castle wall.” Some of the rabbit holes we go down: Why narrow scope is this show’s superpower, and why more IPs should tell bite-sized stories instead of promising the world and failing to deliver it. The Die Hard approach to the final fight: he doesn’t win because he’s better, he wins because he won’t stay down. "Are there no true knights among you?" The gap between the title and the oath. ⚔️🛡️👑 Why Aerion knows every loophole. Showing up to a bar fight with a few Navy SEALs. Everything the show added to the novella (Lyonel! Flea Bottom! the goose eggs!) and why most of the additions are improvements 📙 Dunk thinks like a child, Egg thinks like an adult. The inversion is the point. Where could Egg’s arc go from here? Can the show actually make us hate him? (Tinkered has a theory about the series finale that I kind of want him to write.) Word of the day: praxis. Lesson of the day: “Get up.” (Maybe it’s a whole philosophy 🤔) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.libertyrpf.com/subscribe (https://www.libertyrpf.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   13 Feb 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2026) 📈📉📊💰💸

   The annual tradition continues! David Kim (https://www.scuttleblurb.com/) (💚💚💚💚💚 🥃) and I look back at the past year, both for Scuttleblurb (https://www.scuttleblurb.com/) and for the world of finance & markets. We use David’s excellent ‘2025 business update (https://www.scuttleblurb.com/update-25/)’ as a foundation for our chat, and I encourage you to read it. We cover a lot of ground. David’s unusually candid look at the business of running a paid newsletter (subscriber churn, the tension between writing what interests you and writing what gets clicks, and why he almost renamed his blog “Fallen Angels”), the tactical changes he made to turn things around (frequency, the Scuttlebits format, a price increase that went better than expected), and his partnership with our common friend MBI (https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/) (🇧🇩🇺🇸) on the Never Sell podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/3Fdub8zkhm4xwN1ZcDbv1j) (🎧). On the markets and investing side, we dig into: * The weird vibe of 2025: indices hiding a lot of pain underneath, with good companies down 40-50% while the index barely fell. * Why investors seem blind to cyclicality in ways they weren’t 20 years ago (Trex at 65x peak earnings vs. home builders at single-digit multiples in ‘05-’06). * The beaten-down compounder opportunity, and how fast some of those names recovered. * The AI pain trade rotating into SaaS and data providers (Gartner, FactSet, S&P, Thomson Reuters), and why the bear case on Gartner may be missing something important. * David’s forensic breakdown of how Shift Four calculates organic growth, including cross-selling synergies from acquisitions in ways most acquirers don’t, and why the sell-side comparisons to payment peers aren’t apples-to-apples. * Booz Allen and the frenemy dynamics with Palantir/Anduril. The write-up almost nobody read but David is most proud of. * How competitive boundaries between industries are getting blurrier, including for Big Tech, and what that means for moat analysis * David’s nuanced take on using AI tools for research, where it levels you up vs. where the “knowledge illusion” kicks in and de-skilling becomes a real risk. We also talk about what’s next in his research pipeline (Veeve, U-Haul, Lamb Weston, S&P, Moody’s, Thomson Reuters, etc), and whether Pluribus can stick the landing in season two. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed talking to David! 💚 🥃 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.libertyrpf.com/subscribe (https://www.libertyrpf.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

Inside a recent episode

Project Hail Mary Explained: Book vs Movie (Spoilers, Science & Why Rocky Works) 🧑‍🚀🚀⭐🦠🪨

Published 29 May 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] What's Rocky to you? Why does he work? Why is he a compelling alien? Why is he a compelling buddy for Grace? Why is he so lovable? What makes him work? I can start with one or two that I have. I don't know if it's the wholeness of my views, but first of all, it does make me wonder, obviously the writing of the book, it's the bedrock of who we perceive Rocky to be, right? But I do wonder, especially since the audio book was so popular for this one, What's the name of the narrator again, Liberty? You said it earlier. Ray Porter. I wonder how much Ray Porter actually shaped that. His delivery created our impression of Rocky and that carried over. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.8 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 38 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

64

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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