If you have every thought about building a company or solving a problem, this is the episode for you!

Yahia has built and exited several companies, and talks about how to understand the trade-off between more traditional university to corporate routes and the drop-out entrepreneurial route, and where the sweet spot might lie between them!

We also chat (not) being able to switch off from founder mode and some of Yahia's recommendations for where to go to learn more!

For this episode, I sat down with Om Buddhdev. We first met through the Bay Area startup world, but almost every conversation we've had has ended up somewhere completely different. We can start talking about machine learning infrastructure and somehow end up discussing competitive gaming, mathematics, content creation, or why some people become obsessed enough with something to become genuinely world-class at it.

What makes Om interesting isn't just what he's building now, but the way he thinks. We talked about:

* Why obsession is often misunderstood.

* Growing up through competitive gaming, from Roblox to Valorant.

* What creating content teaches you about the internet and about yourself.

* How research changes the way you think.

* What it actually feels like to become good at something from scratch, and how to do that

One of my favourite parts of the conversation was realising how many of these ideas are really about the same thing. Whether it's games, maths, research, startups, or content creation, they all reward the same willingness to stay curious.

If you're watching this and you've got something unexpected to talk about - something you're into that nobody ever asks you about - I want to hear from you.

This show is about interesting people and the things that make them interesting.

New episodes whenever I find someone worth sitting down with!

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You can find the audio version on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and the video version on YouTube and Spotify

I'm @erinmerylstudy across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack.

David Khachaturov is my cofounder at Egoist Machines. But before any of that, we met at a Caledonian dancing class in Cambridge - which tells you basically everything you need to know about him!

David is our CTO.

We're not really talking about that.

Instead we get into what it was actually like spending 8 years at Cambridge University (and what he thought about that), why working with someone you met at a Scottish country dancing class in the first place is a good idea, and what it's like to go from that to building a company together in San Francisco.

We also talk about sport, the future of education, game design and, as always, the books, films, and talks that have shaped how he sees the world.

This felt like the right episode to start with, both as an introduction to Egoist Machines, but also because David is most definitely one of the most interesting, and very little of what makes him interesting is obvious from the outside.

That's kind of the whole point of this show ;)