Podcast Notes Playlist: Latest Episodes

Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine where he is also the Director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• If you take stories and lessons that have been tested and proven over centuries or millenniums and write a modern story based on it, it will likely still connect and be a major hit with people today
• Steven worked multiple jobs throughout his life and wrote for 20 years on the side before becoming a full-time
• One day, your “call” will arrive – take the leap and let magic happen
  • Making the leap to pursue your dreams or accept the call to adventure is often scary–
  • BUT – When you take theses risks, that’s when great things happen
• Each person has a calling or destiny to be great if they follow the right path
  • But the clock is ticking for all of us…
  • Don’t avoid taking the path out of the fear of leaving your current comforts
• The dreams you have at night mean something – pay attention to them

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



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Steven Pressfield was a cab driver for years before becoming a best-seller author. He's taught me about following your gut and not letting time get in the way of who you’re supposed to become. Listen to Steven talk about the hero’s journey and how you can become the hero of your life (even if you feel like it’s too late, it’s not.) 

 

I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.

  

Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:

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Picking partners with high intelligence, energy and integrity is the three-part checklist that you can't compromise on.

"An overactive ego is a tyrant." - Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

His newest book is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which will be available as a paperback in May.

And if you haven't yet, check out "Trip of Compassion", which is the most compelling movie I've seen in the last year. It documents one unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you, an innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as “ecstasy”). As you will see firsthand, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks and not years. Find out more by clicking here. 

This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.

As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.

This podcast is also brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.

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Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Instead of focusing so much on adding good habits into your life, consider first subtracting the bad ones
• With the internet you can learn to do nearly anything as long as you have the necessary desire to do so
• “If you consume the same information as everyone else, how are you going to come up with unique ideas?”
• “It is much more important for people to cut out bad information than it is to seek good information”
  • Carefully curate who you follow on Twitter – if you follow the right people, Twitter can be a great educational tool, rather than a dopamine farm
  • Stop consuming information with a short-term shelf life – it won’t matter tomorrow
• We’re moving into an age where you’re social media account/writing may be more valuable than you’re education at securing you a job
• If a book is still being recommended 30+ after it was written, that’s what you want to be reading

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

My guest this week is unique and so requires a short story.

I met our guest Michael Mayer because of twitter. I followed and enjoyed one of several pseudonymous accounts that he maintains to experiment with ideas. His various accounts have wide followings.

I think many of the best accounts on twitter are anonymous or pseudonymous, and I’ve always made a point to get to know the ones I like best. As it turns out, Michael was also an entrepreneur. He’d been building a new company and was raising a small amount of outside capital.

I didn’t invest personally, in part because he raised it so quickly after I spoke with him. Ever since, I’ve gotten to know him better and followed his company, Bottomless, with interest. You know that I am always hyper transparent about any potential conflicts of interest, so it’s worth noting that while I am not an investor in this company, I expect to be at some point in the future.

The topic of our conversation is both his social media activity and his company. I am a coffee fanatic, and the problem he is solving is one I live. I order a weekly bag of coffee beans, but I often have too much coffee or run out. Bottomless solves this by shipping you a simple scale which you keep wherever you store your coffee, connect to your Wi-Fi, and set your bag of coffee on. It automatically orders new coffee for you at the right time. Thus the name: Bottomless. If you like the conversation, check out bottomless.com 

With this podcast, all I’m really trying to do is find, meet, and learn from interesting people. Michael certainly qualifies. I hope you enjoy this unique episode.

 

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

 

Show Notes

2:06 - (First Question) – Why he writes under a pseudonym online

2:58 – Positive impacts of writing this way

3:45 – His background

5:02 – Habits he improved upon

7:03 – Where did his exploration into technology and start-ups come from

            7:33 – Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

10:32 – Elements of business that interest him most

13:26 – Building social capital vs the current state of education

17:06 – What information does he like to consume

            18:17 – Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

            18:34 – Jerry Neumann blog Reaction Wheel | Podcast episode

            18:39 – Kevin Simler’s blog  Melting Asphalt| Podcast Episode

21:01 – Why the current education system is busted

22:54 – Formation of his business

24:04 – Importance of making things legible

25:54 – On demand delivery vs subscription business models

30:16 – Early day in developing the scale for his business

33:50 – What he learned about coffee roasters

35:29 – thoughts on supplier power

36:17 – The customer relationship

39:50 – Best objections to his business

41:58 – Biggest operational/emotional challenges

42:56 – Best moment

44:39 – Time at Y combinator

46:28 – His unique co-founder story

49:47 – Marketing strategies and acquisition costs

51:37 – The idea of a commercial loop

53:27 – Discarded ideas, such as spaced repetition social networks

57:38 – Having a long-term plan vs reformatting a business into success

1:00:35 – What works on twitter based on his experience

1:03:09 – Most controversial opinion

1:05:59 – Kindest thing anyone has done

 

Learn More

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. 

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people. All returns in life come from compound interest over many turns of the game.

The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, by allowing you to scale any niche obsession.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Synthetic biology will be first to deliver world-ending capability to individuals
  • Just think forward – it’s probably safe to say that a desktop DNA synthesizer from the year 2038 will be capable of things that the entire synthetic biology project is capable of today
  • A single individual, if they chose to do so, would be able to wipe out the entire species
• Consider the worst possible synthetic biology attack being something that wiped out humanity
  • If something like this was attempted, and ended up being a failure (say it only killed 1% of the population) – it would still cripple society
• But it gets even worse…
  • If today, a synthetic biology attack were to sicken only 1% of the population (not kill), most cities don’t even have a fifth that much hospital bed capacity
• The “Ender”
  • This is the term Naval coined for an individual trying to kill everyone on earth
  • What’s the best way to stop “enders”? – Make sure there aren’t any in the first place
    • How do we do this? – Make sure NOBODY GOES UNLOVED
      • “At some point, if someone tries to end the world, it will be because they weren’t loved enough”
• What’s the point of talking about all these potential negative outcomes from AI, synthetic biology, mass terrorism etc.?
  • In a sense, we’re training the “societal immune system” to have some awareness and concern about these potential occurrences
  • Awareness > no awareness

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

A rampage killer with a knife can kill a few. With a gun, dozens. With a jetliner, way more. What might future tech enable? In Part Two of our conversation, Naval and I discuss "The Ender."And how to preclude this monstrosity.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• It’s been getting easier and easier to destroy something thanks to technology
  • The destructive powers arrive long before the protective powers (creating destructive power is actually a lot easier)
    • Think – From the moment we first split the atom to the first nuclear bomb was a much shorter trip to the first nuclear power plant
• Commercial air travel will eventually come to an end because weaponized drones will just be too prevalent
  • Remember the airplane that went down and landed in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese?
    • Now just imagine a ton of miniaturized drones doing the same thing
  • A few important points:
    • The drones don’t have to launch until a plane takes off – which makes them even more effective
    • The person/group operating the drones wouldn’t even have to expose themselves
• A nightmare future scenario – Automated assassination markets
  • What’s an assassination market?
    • You build a piece of code that lives peer-to-peer in the dark web
    • People can then go there and contribute small amounts of money in untraceable ways (like with crypto) and essentially bid up assassinations on people they don’t like
      • This would allow for the crowd-funding of assassinations
• The potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) are huge, but we need to be very, very cautious of the negative scenarios that might also play out
• On mass shootings and mass murders:
  • In the future, as technologies advance and proliferate, the types of people who do these things could have access to some terrifying capabilities – thus the death tolls would only rise
• But one of the most important points:
  • With the above, on a long enough time scale, all of these negative things are likely to happen
• One more quote to get you thinking:
  • “At any given time on the planet, there’s a few people, and one is too many…. if you gave them a button that would end the planet, they would press that button” – Naval

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



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Naval & I discuss a horrifying risk. We questioned whether to post this. Might it give someone ideas? Well, the bad guys already HAVE ideas. And cataclysms are only averted if we face them. There’s still time.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “Time is incredibly valuable, and to ask for someone’s time you should have a good reason for it”
• You should NOT need 10-12 hours a day to get good work done
• Your tasks expand in proportion to the time you allow them
• Something to think about:
  • “I find that the more I pay attention to industry trends and who’s doing what, the less free my mind is. You’re just colored by what everyone else is doing and you don’t have as much space for your own thoughts.”
• Instead of setting goals, just try to do the best job you can
• It is SO IMPORTANT to be able to communicate your ideas clearly and be able to persuade others to listen to what you have to say
• The fact that communication is speeding up with things like texting and work messaging apps, does not mean our responses to these messages should be speeding up as well

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Basecamp CEO and co-founder Jason Fried gives us a peek behind the scenes of his company and discusses his philosophy on doing great work, making a positive difference, and learning to breathe in the fast paced culture of today’s workplace.

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For comprehensive show notes on this episode, including a full edited transcript, go to https://fs.blog/podcast/

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