Blackstone Podcast

Informative

Very informative. Only criticism is that I didn’t like it when Joe Baratta went after Peter Wallace for not liking roller coasters. That is a perfectly reasonable view!

The Blackstone Podcast is highly informative. I was just listening to the the GSO Quarterly episode: it distills key insights and transmits ideas efficiently and compactly. A lot of thinking has been done by the presenters in advance. The GSO presenters from both GSO episodes opine within the scope of their knowledge (mid-cap leveraged loans), unlike other podcasts which presuppose omniscience. To my complete surprise, the presenters did the impossible and actually conveyed the nuances of what GSO does, which is somewhat technical. They also gave an impossible-to-find-elsewhere perspective of why people invest in leveraged loans to me (answer: post serial-acquisition deleveraging). That argument, from this podcast, is better than the banal "people want higher/floating-rate ruturns" that you read everywhere else. Also, so many finance companies' podcasts have this tone "everything is great" "everything is going to be amazing in terms of the macro picture". The GSO episodes are refreshingly realistic—not unduly rosy—as if this is actually the presenters' unfiltered perspective, even in the realm of Blackstone's own product areas. I feel a lot better about the strength of Blackstone having listened to this, which is reassuring when you think about such a highly geared valuation-sensitive industry, late-cycle.

Incredibly informative + solid lineup of guests = top podcast in my opinion