The Accent Podcast

Dr. Peter Brand is an ancient historian and Egyptologist specializing in history and culture of ancient Egypt during its imperial age (ca. 1550–1100 BCE). He is author of The Monuments of Seti I and their Historical Significance: Epigraphic, Historical and Art-Historical Analysis (Brill, 2000), and has written numerous articles on Egyptian kingship, monumental art and construction, history, popular religion, warfare, and diplomacy during the late Eighteenth Dynasty and Ramesside period. Since 2001, Dr. Brand has served as director of the Karnak Hypostyle Hall Project, which is recording, conserving, and interpreting hundreds of scenes and hieroglyphic texts carved on the walls and columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall. Dr. Brand has appeared in over twenty documentaries for the History Channel, Discovery, and National Geographic.

GET THE BOOK - Ramesses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh: https://amzn.to/3RufmMS

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:35 Teaching Egyptology

08:20 How pyramids were built

12:50 Ancient Egypt through 18th Dynasty: Akhenaten, Tutankhamun

26:30 Beginning of 19th Dynasty

31:15 Seti I

35:50 Ancient Egypt's source of wealth

38:25 Egyptian army

40:25 Ramesses II – Childhood

45:05 Prince Ramesses II

49:45 "Female Household" and wives of Ramesses II

01:04:05 Ramesses II takes the throne

01:09:55 Highlights of Ramesses II reign

01:15:05 The Battle of Kadesh

01:21:10 Interpreting Hieroglyphs

01:27:40 Pharaohs or Kings?

01:30:40 Decline of Ancient Egypt

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Professor Suri is the author and editor of eleven books on politics and foreign policy, most recently: Civil War By Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (which we discuss in the interview).

SELECT BOOKS BY JEREMI SURI:

- Civil War by Other Means: https://amzn.to/3F5DXSC

- The Impossible Presidency: https://amzn.to/3RQTRI1

- Liberty's Surest Guardian: https://amzn.to/3toGe8R

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:20 The Civil War never ended

03:05 Formation of the Republican Party

07:50 Causes of the Civil War and the reasons for North winning

14:15 South after the Civil War

19:00 Why Abraham Lincoln is the best president in the US history

20:10 John Wilkes Booth

22:55 Andrew Johnson is the worst president

26:20 Alexander Watkins Terrell

29:45 Moving on after wars

31:00 Ulysses S. Grant Presidency

34:45 Disputed 1876 Elections

38:10 Electoral College must go

45:55 Presidents James Garfield and Chester Arthur

50:45 Grover Cleveland – first President from the Democrat Party

53:50 Republicans and Democrats switching agendas

55:40 Cancers in American institutions

01:00:55 Rating the recent Presidents

01:04:45 Most Overrated and Underrated Presidents

01:07:00 How you should read Jeremi Suri's books

Dr. Konstantin Batygin is a Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Batygin and his colleague, Michael Brown, have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which they have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the Sun.

Support the Accent on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:45 Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg

03:35 Encounter with conspiracists

06:40 Rumors of Alien space crafts

10:15 Where to look for life in the Universe

12:50 Planet Formation

17:20 Discovering planets

25:20 Pluto is no longer a planet

27:40 Planet Nine

34:30 Hypothesis of other cosmic bodies

35:15 Primordial Black Holes

43:15 Music Career

52:25 Scientific awards

57:40 Immigration to Japan and USA

01:01:30 Lex Fridman

01:02:30 Parents influence

Dr. Allen Frances is a Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is best known for serving as chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force overseeing the development and revision of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Dr. Frances is the founding editor of two well-known psychiatric journals: the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice. During the development of the current diagnostic manual, DSM-5, Dr. Frances became critical of the expanding boundaries of psychiatry and the medicalization of normal human behavior, problems he contends are leading to the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of the "worried well" and the gross undertreatment of the severely ill. Dr. Frances is the author or co-author of multiple books within the fields of psychiatry and psychology.

Dr. FRANCES's BOOKs:

Saving Normal: https://amzn.to/497dxxq

Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis: https://amzn.to/494eRBe

FOLLOW Dr. FRANCES ON TWITTER: / allenfrancesmd

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: / theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:25 Changes since Saving Normal

02:30 What is DSM?

06:20 Inflation of diagnosis in children's mental illnesses

14:10 Pharma advertises mental illnesses directly to people

17:00 Nature or Nurture – the root cause of mental illnesses

21:35 Psychotherapy

25:35 Depressions should not be confused with normal mammalian phenomena

29:35 Addiction to medication and drugs

37:45 Selecting psychiatrist

Brian Fagan is an Archeologist, Author, and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. He has written a number of books on archeology, humans, and, most recently, climate change. We discussed Early Humans, the history of hunting, the most influential civilizations, and the effects of localized climate change, which by the way, has nothing to do with politics but rather the history of the phenomena.

TIMESTAMPS

01:10 Did humans evolve from apes

04:25 Hunting of early humans

12:45 Neanderthals

14:40 Humans walked out from Africa

20:50 Most important human tool

22:50 Complexities of archeological discovery

27:25 First Civilizations

32:55 Most influential Civilizations

34:45 Inca Civilization

37:55 Were there lost Civilizations (Atlantis)?

40:50 Why Civilizations Fall

44:35 Localized climate change

50:25 The Future of the human race

James Pan is a former Hedge Fund manager who, a decade ago, returned funds to outside investors and converted his firm into a family office. If you search for CP&E Partners' letters, you will see the phenomenal performance that James has achieved, and he did it as a one-man-shop. In this interview, we discussed James' investment philosophy, investment process, current holdings, and many other things.

Books James is Ayn Rand's fan, so don't forget to read Atlas Shrugged: https://amzn.to/3sqGEel

Support the Accent on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

02:05 Absorbing information

03:45 Path to a Family Office

09:15 Defining Value Investing

13:30 Looking for investment ideas

15:30 First thing to see in a stock

19:30 Valuing companies

25:10 Concentrated vs Diversified portfolio

31:10 Meta

34:30 Latest investment – U-Haul

43:35 Management assessment

44:50 NOL as part of the valuation

46:20 Rolls-Royce

49:05 Writing Call Options

55:35 Investing with Dyslexia

59:15 Definition of Happiness

Dr. Scott Aaronson is Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more generally. For the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years, he is on leave to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety. In this interview, Dr. Aaronson discussed a quantum computer, its comparison to classical computers, and its use cases. He also shared his take on the potential role of quantum computers in Artificial Intelligence.

Get Scott Aaronson's Book

Quantum Computing since Democritus: https://amzn.to/3E290yb

Read Scott Aaronson's blog: https://scottaaronson.blog

Support The Accent on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:45 Misconceptions about Quantum computing

03:00 Quantum Computer vs Classical Computer

08:30 The Schrodinger equation

18:00 What is Quantum Computer good for?

28:45 The look of Quantum computers

43:40 Quantum Error Correction

46:50 Quantum computing in AI

55:25 Would you choose Machin Learning or Quantum Computer for a major

57:50 Take on Michio Kaku's book Quantum Supremacy….(oh, well)

Joby Warrick is a best-selling author and a national security correspondent for The Washington Post. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he served for 24 years with the Post's national and investigative staffs, reporting from Washington and scores of cities around the world. He is the author of three two nonfiction books, including "The Triple Agent", a New York Times best-seller about a CIA operation in Afghanistan; "Red Line", and "Black Flags", a narrative account of the personalities and events that gave rise to the Islamic State. "Black Flags" was listed as one of the best books of 2015 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications, and it was the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

BOOKs:

Black Flags: https://amzn.to/3QE46NK

The Triple Agent: https://amzn.to/49zq5On

Red Line: https://amzn.to/3FYaLxo

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:35 The most surprising thing about ISIS

03:30 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

06:45 Afghanistan after the Soviet Union

08:00 Zarqawi in al-Jafr prison

10:05 Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi

13:00 Al-Qaida of Iraq, and Zarqawi's weaponization of religion

17:30 Black Flags

20:00 The US invasion of Iraq

28:00 Big pause after Zarqawi

31:50 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the Rise of ISIS

38:00 A typical ISIS Fighter

40:30 New ISIS

43:10 Roots of Islamic Radicalization

47:00 Joby's books

Tapio Schneider is a climate scientist and a professor of environmental science and engineering at the California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding how the turbulent dynamics of the atmosphere, from clouds to large-scale weather systems, shape Earth's climate. Ultimately, his goal is to develop a set of physical laws that govern climate.

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:20 Climate Change or Global Warming?

04:25 Greenhouses and their effects

07:25 The worst-case scenario

12:30 Genesis of Thoughts on Climate Change

17:35 Melting of Ice Sheets

23:20 Disagreements on the Climate Change

27:50 Main emitters of greenhouses

30:35 Solutions to Climate Change

33:50 Do EVs make a difference

39:00 Why not switch to renewables

Tim Staermose is the founder of the African Lions Fund, which invests in sub-Saharan African "Frontier" economies, excluding South Africa. Tim is also an investment writer, and his website - www.GlobalValueHunter.com - is full of global value investing ideas.

SUPPORT THE ACCENT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theaccentpodcast

TIMESTAMPS

01:10 Perception of Africa (Factfulness book)

08:25 Long or Short-term opportunity: Main Thesis

13:25 Asian model will not work in Africa

16:10 Leading Industries

18:35 Valuations in Africa

21:55 Investment process

29:25 Banking Industry in Africa

32:10 Position sizing

35:10 Hedging

38:50 Taxation of the fund

40:15 Largest position (NMB Bank - Tanzania)

48:45 Recent investments (KCB Bank, Equity Bank, Safaricom – Kenya)

52:40 Selling stocks