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 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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In this episode of A Book with Legs, hosts Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager, and Bill Smead, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Smead Capital Management, sit down with author David Williams to discuss his book, “The William E. Boeing Story: A Gift of Flight.”
The conversation traces Bill Boeing’s path from a wealthy heir working timberland in Hoquiam, Washington, to founding both Boeing and United Airlines almost by accident, chasing a hobby with no clear business model at the time. Along the way: a prohibition-era wiretapping scandal that helped shape modern privacy law, a government breakup of his company in the 1930s that was reversed within a decade when Roosevelt needed thousands of bombers built for WWII, and the origin story of the modern flight attendant through Ellen Church, a woman who was told no when she asked to be a pilot and created an entirely new profession instead.
David is a former executive director of the Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum near Seattle and has written 10 books on motorsports and aviation. For this project, the Boeing family gave him unprecedented access to their private archives, thousands of never-before-seen photos, diaries, and personal letters, making this the first full-length biography of the father of commercial aviation.
“The William E. Boeing Story: A Gift of Flight,” is available now on https://www.hydromuseumstore.org/books-and-magazines/
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What can the history of newspapers teach us about today's media landscape?
In the latest episode of A Book with Legs, Smead Capital Management CEO and Portfolio Manager C. W. Smead, CFA is joined by author Alex Wright to discuss his book, Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper.
Cole and Alex trace the evolution of American newspapers from the Revolutionary era through the rise of mass media, exploring how technological disruption, government policy, advertising, and human behavior shaped the way information spread. They also discuss the parallels between the early newspaper industry and today's digital media ecosystem.
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