A Book with Legs

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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In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager, and Bill Smead, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Smead Capital Management, sit down with Liaquat Ahamed to discuss his book, “1873: The Rothschilds, The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World.”
Liaquat Ahamed explores 1873 as the first truly global financial crisis, centered on the Rothschild family, then the wealthiest bankers in the world. The conversation traces how the Rothschilds nearly collapsed in 1848, losing 40% of their capital, only to rebuild over the next 25 years into a bank controlling a third of the entire European banking system. Liaquat and the Smeads discuss how market psychology moves in generational cycles, why it can take a full generation to recover confidence after a crash, and how President Grant’s decision to defend the gold standard during the 1873 panic prolonged deflation across the U.S. economy.
“1873: The Rothschilds, The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World,” published by Penguin Press, is available now.
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