A Book with Legs

In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, sits down with Erwin Chemerinsky to discuss his book, “Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times,” co-authored with Howard Gillman.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Before joining Berkeley in 2017, he served as founding Dean of UC Irvine School of Law. He is one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, the author of more than twenty books, including leading casebooks on constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction, and a regular advocate before the United States Supreme Court. His deanship at Berkeley Law has been extended through 2029.
The conversation starts from the premise that a university cannot punish an idea just because it clashes with the school’s mission, then works through where campuses keep losing the line between what the law allows and what is wise. They cover the heckler’s veto and Stanford Law’s disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan, Berkeley’s multimillion-dollar security bill for controversial speakers, inconsistent enforcement of encampment rules after October 7, content neutrality, Title VI hostile-environment duties, DEI statements as a hiring screen, and hard cases including Hamline, Kilborn, Amy Wax, and Ilya Shapiro. Chemerinsky’s through line is viewpoint neutrality: protect the speech you loathe, punish disruption rather than ideas, and do not pretend doing nothing is always legal when a hostile environment is in play.
“Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times,” published by Yale University Press, is available now.
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In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, is joined by Chairman and Chief Investment Officer Bill Smead for the firm’s quarterly book list.
Cole and Bill walk through what they have recently finished, what they are reading now, and what is on deck. Recent titles include David Williams’s “The William E. Boeing Story”, Liaquat Ahamed’s “1873”, Ken Rogoff’s “Our Dollar, Your Problem”, Adrian Wooldridge’s “The Revolutionary Center”, Bryan Burrough’s “The Gunfighters”, and Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman’s “Campus Speech and Academic Freedom”. Currently in progress are Lydia Towns’s “In Search of Trade and Fortune”, George Orwell’s “1984”, and A. W. Tozer’s “God’s Pursuit of Man”.
The conversation uses those books as mental models, including comparing today's AI enthusiasm with the railroad boom and the panics of 1873 and 1893. In the second half, they turn to the firm’s eight criteria and the market: Nike’s core shoe business versus apparel, the 10-year Treasury back near 5 percent, and a gun-to-the-head choice between that Treasury and the S&P 500 over the next decade. Tozer’s reminder from Ecclesiastes 12:12 that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” hangs over the book list episode itself.
If you have a book to recommend for a future list, email podcast@smeadcap.com or reach the firm on X at @smeadcap.
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In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, sits down with Dr. Kenneth Rogoff to discuss his book, "Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead."
Kenneth Rogoff is the Maurits C. Boas Professor of Economics at Harvard University. From 2001 to 2003, he served as Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, and earlier in his career was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board. He is the co-author, with Carmen Reinhart, of the New York Times bestseller "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," as well as "Foundations of International Macroeconomics" and "The Curse of Cash." He earned his Ph.D. in economics at MIT and is also an international grandmaster of chess.
The conversation explores the dollar's position at the center of global finance, from the history of currency dominance dating back to Spain, to the rise of populism and its threat to the dollar's exorbitant privilege, to real, candid stories from Rogoff's own experience meeting Chinese leadership and warning of the country's real estate crisis years before it hit. They also discuss the euro's uneven path, the Mexican peso crisis, and what stablecoins and cryptocurrency really mean for the future of money.
Read Kenneth's column here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist
"Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead," published by @YaleUniversityPress , is available now.
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In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, sits down with Adrian Wooldridge to discuss his book, “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.”
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist at Bloomberg News, and previously spent more than twenty years at The Economist, serving as political editor and Washington bureau chief. He is the author of twelve previous books, including “Capitalism in America,” co-written with former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, and “The Aristocracy of Talent.”
The conversation traces the intellectual roots of liberalism, from Erasmus and Hobbes to Mill and Tocqueville, and explores where the philosophy has drifted from its original ideals. Along the way: how the concentration of power in figures like the Mag 7 and today’s tech leaders echoes Montesquieu’s warnings, how identity politics shifted the unit of analysis from individuals to groups, and what Wooldridge believes must change to recover what he calls “the revolutionary center” before autocracy, fascism, or societal stratification takes hold.
“The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism,” published by Pegasus Books, is available now.
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In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager, welcomes back Bryan Burrough to discuss his book, “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild.”
Bryan Burrough is a New York Times bestselling author or coauthor of eight books, including the Wall Street classic “Barbarians at the Gate,” which he previously discussed on A Book With Legs podcast, as well as “Public Enemies,” “The Big Rich,” and “Forget the Alamo.” He spent nearly a decade as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and has been a longtime special correspondent for Vanity Fair.
The conversation traces how a Southern honor code, a new piece of technology, the Colt revolver, and a generation of traumatized Civil War veterans collided in one state to produce three decades of violence, and how journalism turned killers into folk heroes. Along the way: how Texas became home to 30% of all major postwar gunfights in America, the true origins of the gunfighter in Southern dueling culture rather than frontier life, and how legends like Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Jesse James were built as much by newspapers as by their own actions.
“The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,” published by Penguin Press, is available now.
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