Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

• The more technology and capitalism we get, the better things are going to get 
• Fundamentally, whether or not a startup succeeds depends on whether it is building a product that people want 
• Great people want to be around other great people; most companies are too tolerant of mediocrity 
• In the long run, even the most innovative companies eventually become boring
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: Due to humanity’s tribal inclinations, the Tall Poppy – the person trying to do something new – tends to get cut 
• When something in tech is successful, it tends to change the status structures and hierarchies of society
• The Law of Crappy People: The quality of any level in the company will degrade to the worst person at that level 
• “More companies die of indigestion than of starvation.” – Marc Andreessen  
• The best companies can think in the long term despite the pressures to prioritize the short-term 
• New things in the world are not going to show up predictably 
• By 2030 or 2035, you will be able to have the equivalent of 1,000 AI programmers writing code for you 
• Most people who are opposed to technological change are not opposed to the given technology but are opposed to how that technology may diminish their status and power 

Marc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser. After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry.

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• The universe is biased towards certain futures; there is a natural direction where the whole system wants to go 
• If you believe the future will be better, and that you have the agency to make it happen, then you are increasing the likelihood of that better future happenings 
• “Technically, e/acc was started in a basement. I quit big tech, moved back in with my parents, sold my car, let go of my apartment, bought about $100K of GPUs, and I just started building.” – Guillaume Verdon
• The goal of the e/acc movement is for the human techno-capital mimetic machine to become self-aware and to superstitiously engineer its growth
• The core thesis of e/acc: The adaptation of the system is what has gotten us to this point in time; this process is good, and we should keep it going 
• The market is more efficient at achieving optimums than are heavy-handed regulations, which tend to be subversive and written by the incumbents  
• Any centralized power structure becomes a target for those who want to co-opt it 
• A system that maintains dynamism and adaptability avoids tyranny  
• The way to a good future is to shape adversarial equilibria between the various AI players 
• Whatever configuration of matter or information leads to maximal growth is where humans and AI will converge; we can either align ourselves with this trajectory or get left behind by trying to decelerate
• Continuing to climb up the Kardashev scale is the great challenge of our time  

Guillaume Verdon (aka Beff Jezos on Twitter) is a physicist, quantum computing researcher, and founder of e/acc (effective accelerationism) movement. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/guillaume-verdon-transcript

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• We are in a new era of marketing; entertainment is being built around the product 
• Focus is a superpower 
• Having the optimal mix of optimism and pessimism is key to business success 
• “You can’t tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck.” – Palmer Luckey 
• Do not wait for your current thing to get bad before choosing to work on something else
• People who do one thing and take it very seriously win over the long-term 

Episode 531: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) bring you…..The 2023 Milly Awards. Actors have the Oscars, musicians have the Grammy’s and what do business people have? They have The Milly Awards. 

No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd

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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.

• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future

• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto

• #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett

• ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates

• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More

• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

• Ask yourself, “What is the thing that I uniquely enjoy?” 
• Since there is so much noise in sales, you must do something to stand out; using humor and satire are two ways to do that 
• To make the niche content funny, you need to know the terminology of the niche 
• There are no rules on X/Twitter; the owner of the site sells cars… we are on Twitter to have fun and laugh!
• Criteria for identifying problems to solve: market size, excitement, time-to-first-dollar, and product viability 
• Having passion for the space and users you are serving is probably more important than passion for the individual idea 
• Don’t get married to your original idea; be open to pivoting throughout your journey 
• Question to consider: “Am I working on something valuable to the world?” 

So it goes for ego. To the untrained eye, it can be mistaken for confidence. The person’s self-centeredness, their certainty, their entitlement—this seems like the way that only the most important and gifted person in the world could get away with acting. In reality, the person doesn’t feel that way inside at all. On the contrary, they feel very small. Nero, for instance, demanded that enormous audiences celebrate his greatness. This was also the same emperor who banished a poet from Rome for being too talented, and thus a threat.

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And with today's meditation on the day's Daily Journal excerpt, Ryan reminds us that as we get older we should get better at not taking it taking it for granted, living each day as a representation as the person you aspire to be. For the last five years, we have been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. 21 challenges designed to set you up to be able to say, whatever happens in 2024 and beyond, this is precisely what I trained for.. Demand more of yourself in 2024. Prepare for whatever is ahead. Head over todailystoic.com/challengeand sign up NOW!

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• Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a shortcut 
• Once you become complacent, it is all over 
• You might not be smarter than everyone else, but youcan know more about something than everyone else 
• Get out of your office and help the customers
• Appeal to interest, not to reason
• Employees are inherently self-interested; ensure that the company’s incentive structure aligns with this reality   
• Never take advantage of a customer or employee, but take every advantage you can over the competition 
• “Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto. You must do it in volume – it is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat.” – Les Schwab 

What I learned from rereading Les Schwab Pride In Performance: Keep It Going! by Les Schwab. 

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(8:00) I didn't know how to ride a bike. We never had one. All the other young kids delivered newspapers on a bike. 

He's got no money. He doesn't have a bike. So he ran his routes for two months in order to get enough money to buy his first bike. He’d run nine or 10 miles a day. 

(8:00) I was too proud to complain.

(10:00) For a poor boy, money was much more important than pride.

(10:00) Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel by Sam Zell. (Founders #269)

(13:00) I was young. I was cocky. But the same cockiness helped me a lot in going through life.

(15:00) The very first sentence describing his very first day in business is mind blowing: I had never fixed a flat tire in my life.

(15:00) the NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger (Founders #329)

(29:00) Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble (Founders #150)

(35:00) I always knew that if we fixed all the flat tires in town, we'd have all the tire business in town.

(40:00) If we become complacent, then brother, it's all over with.

(52:00) Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc (Founders #293)

(56:00) If you’re not serving the customer, or supporting the folks who do, we don’t need you. —Sam Walton

(1:00:00) The company paid low wages and had a lower overhead. The flaw was they didn’t get —with the low pay— near the quality of employees we had.

(1:01:00) Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a shortcut.

(1:06:00) Decision making should always be made at the lowest possible level.

(1:08:00) Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat.

(1:08:00) Charlie Munger analyzes why Les Schwab was successful.

(1:11:00) Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors:

1 Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Think Costco.

2 Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often, results are not linear. You get a little bit more mass and you get a lollapalooza result. And, of course, I've been searching for lollapalooza results all my life, so I'm very interested in models that explain their occurrence.

3 An extreme of good performance over many factors. Example, Toyota or Les Schwab.

4 Catching and riding some sort of big wave. Example, Oracle.

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

• “Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.” – Charlie Munger 
• Genius has the fewest moving parts 
• “Good ideas are rare. Bet heavily when you find them.” – Charlie Munger 
• Understand the power of inversion; get what you want by avoiding what you do not want 
• Wisdom is prevention: wise people don’t solve problems, they avoid them 
• If you play games in which other people have an edge, and you do not, you are going to lose 
• Do not silo your educational pursuits; study different disciplines and make connections between them 
• Learn how to ignore the examples of others when they are wrong
• Life will have terrible blows; you must not engage in self-pity and be able to pick yourself back up 
• “The best thing a human being can do is help another human being know more.” – Charlie Munger  

What I learned from reading the NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger. 

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Listen to this incredible conversation between Charlie Munger and John Collison on Invest Like The Best. 

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(2:00) The practical wisdom of Poor Charlie's Almanack, this ode to curiosity, generosity, and virtue will similarly compound at successive generations of entrepreneurial readers extend his lessons to their own circumstances.

(12:00) Education is the process whereby the ability to lead a good life is acquired.  — Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson. (Founders #252)

(22:00) Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.

(29:00) Charlie is content to trust his own judgment when it runs counter to the wisdom of the herd.

(31:00) Animated: Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement

(31:30) Aim for durability. Durability has always been a first rate virtue in Charlie’s eyes.

(32:00) Charlie only focuses on great businesses and great businesses have moats.

(33:00) Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin. (Founders #183)

(42:00) You can flourish in a niche: People who specialize in the business world —and get very good because they specialize— frequently find good economics that they wouldn't get any other way.

(45:00) Being so well known has advantages of scale. This is what you might call an informational advantage. It increases social proof.

(46:30) Business Breakdowns episode on Coca Cola 

(49:00) Occasionally scaling down and intensifying gives you a big advantage. (You can find great profit margins this way)

(50:00) Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton. (Founders #234)

(51:00) Scale and fanaticism combined is very powerful. (Think Sam Walton)

(57:00) I also believed then, as I do now after more than fifty years as a money manager, that the surest way to get rich is to play only those games or make those investments where I have an edge. — A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp. (Founders #222)

(1:08:00) The best thing a human being can do is help another human being know more.

(1:14:00) Optimism is a moral duty. — Edwin Land

(1:17:00) You want to maximize the playing time of your top players.

(1:17:00) The game of competitive life often requires maximizing the experience of the people who have the most aptitude and the most determination as learning machines.

(1:22:00) The most important rule in management is get the incentives right.

(1:25:00) Never, ever think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Ted Turner's Autobiography.

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Listen to Art of Investing #4 David Senra Lessons from the Founder Historian. 

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(9:00) My net worth dropped by about 67 million per week, or nearly 10 million per day, every day for two and a half years.

(10:00) Once to drive home a point about the difficulties of attracting good loyal employees he told me: Jesus only had to pick 12 disciples and even one of those didn't turn out well.

(10:00) Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise .

(11:00) Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Founders #141)

(13:30) The problem isn't getting rich, it's staying sane. — Charlie Munger

(17:00) I learned a lesson that would stick with me throughout my career. When the chips are down in the pressure's on it's amazing to how creative people can be.

(20:00) My father always maintained many of the different billboard businesses as separate legal entities. (He didn’t want to dilute ownership of his main company and separate entities allowed for periodic reorganization to offset capital gains liabilities.

(20:30) When you own an asset your job is to maximize its value.

(23:00) He combines the assets he has in a way his competitors can not.

(24:00) The more I learned about TV stations the more I realized that ours was a disaster. Of the 35 people who were on the payroll when we took over only two were still there a year later —the custodian and the receptionist.

(25:00) Ted Turner believed in the power of television more than almost anybody else.

(30:30) My dad taught me early on that longterm relationships with your customers and partners are very important. You never know how the guy who you're friendly with today might be able to help you tomorrow.

(31:00) Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business by Mark Robichaux. (Founders #268)

(32:00) What other people in his industry sees as a threat, Ted sees as an opportunity.

(37:00) These issues were all unchartered territory. All of us, the regulators, the broadcasters, the program suppliers and the leagues were sorting things out on the fly. I was working as hard as I could. I'd go all out during the day, working on sales, distribution, regulatory issues, whatever the battle happened to be, and I'd worked right up until it was time to fall asleep. I had a pull down Murphy bed in my office and I would literally work until the point of total exhaustion. Then I'd put my head on the pillow at night worried about problems. Then I'd wake up and spend the entire next day trying to solve them.

(44:00) One of the most important ideas in the book is the power of Belief: Clearly the company for whom the economics of 24 hour news would have made the most sense with a big three broadcasters. They already had most of what was needed: studios, bureaus, reporters, anchors. They had everything but a belief in cable.

(45:00) I'm going to be a billionaire. And here's why. I'm going to put this station up on a satellite and I'm going to get a news thing going. Sports, movies and news, 24 hours a day, all over the world. He said this in 1976.

(46:00) Henry Ford didn't need focus groups to tell him that people would prefer inexpensive, dependable automobiles over horses. Alexander Graham Bell never stopped to worry about whether people would prefer speaking to each other on a phone.

(49:00) I'm always convinced that one of the reasons that I've been successful is that I've almost always competed against people who were bigger and stronger, but who had less commitment and desire than I did. For Turner Broadcasting this dispute meant everything. We had to win.

(52:00) Ted’s Superstation idea is printing money: $177 million in revenue and $66 million in profit. This is in the 1980s!

(53:00) It would be 13 years before we faced another 24 hour news channel.

(57:00) He has a keen understanding of how to combine assets to create an advantage that no one else has.

(58:00) The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History by William C. Rempel. (Founders #65)

(58:00) Genius has the fewest moving parts. Never get into deals that are too complicated.

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

• More energy means more humanity flourishing 
• Nuclear fission is the cleanest and safest form of energy that we have 
• As of 2022, nuclear energy accounts for 20% of the electric grid
• Energy is a positive-sum game; the more we have, the better we do! 
• A shift is occurring in the United States: In 2023, 57% of Americans say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity in the country, up from 43% who said the same in 2020
• What if you were told the nuclear industry was the only industry that managed its toxic waste… wouldn’t you be impressed? 
• All of the nuclear waste that has been produced in the United States can fit inside of a football field, stacked 10 meters high 
• It is impossible to create nuclear weapons from nuclear fuel
• Using more energy raises the floor and ceiling for humanity; it can bring the rest of the world up to the Western standard of living, and help power all of the futuristic technology that entrepreneurs will create 
• The amount of radiation that leaked out of the Three Mile Island incident was about the same amount of radiation that you would be exposed to getting a chest X-ray at the doctor – a negligible amount 
• The reaction to Fukushima was completely overblown: it is debated whether zero people or one person died from any sort of radiation at Fukushima
• While nuclear fission has matured from a technological perspective, it has gotten bogged down from a political, cultural, economic, and regulatory perspective
• Significant strides are being made in nuclear fusion; it actually might be less than 30 years away! 

Welcome to the first episode of the first season of “Age of Miracles”. This new show from Packy McCormick, investor and writer of the Not Boring newsletter, asks the question: how do we create a future of abundance?

This season, we’re exploring the future of energy – specifically, diving deep into nuclear energy, both fission and fusion. The world needs more energy, not less, argues Packy, and nuclear has been neglected as a clean, reliable source of energy for too long. Joining Packy as co-host this season is Julia DeWahl, who previously helped scale SpaceX’s Starlink and Opendoor and is now co-founder of micro-nuclear reactor startup Antares. 

In this episode, Packy and Julia set the stage for the season. They start with how they each got nuke-pilled and how the global narrative on energy has shifted, following events like the war in Ukraine and growing inflation. Next, they bust the three most common myths about nuclear energy: it’s too unsafe, there’s too much nuclear waste, and nuclear energy = nuclear weapons. And then they set the stage for the real challenges we’ll tackle this season: the economics of nuclear power, regulation and the role of government, and the power of public perception. 

If you’re curious about the future of energy, technology, or how to get out of a doomer loop and start working towards an abundant future, join us. An age of miracles is within reach — if we're willing to work for it.

Huge thank you to our sponsors:

For the full list of resources referenced in this show: https://ageofmiracles.co/ 

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This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties.

Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Jake Salyers. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg. 

• Check Out the Age of Miracles Website

What if we treated building nuclear more like a manufacturing challenge than a construction challenge? How could nuclear benefit from the tried-and-true methodologies of other large industrial industries like ship-building and oil and gas to make nuclear as cheap as solar and wind to produce?

In this episode – the first of two with leading nuclear fission startup founders – Packy and Julia talk to a new crop of nuclear entrepreneurs who are focused on manufacturing small modular reactors at scale. Drawing on best practices from very different industries like building reactors in shipyards or adapting the methods of offshore oil and gas rigs, these founders are taking a radically different approach from the incumbents in nuclear power plant construction. They’re focused on bringing the experience curves for building nuclear way down

But how will it actually work in practice? How do they balance pleasing regulators with innovating on new designs for more efficiency and manufacturability? How do they finance these businesses? What is the plan for connecting these power sources to the grid – or finding other “behind the meter” use cases? Tune in to go deep with the people turning theories about nuclear manufacturing into reality.

Thank you to this episode’s guests: Matt Slotkin, Nick Touran, Bret Kugelmass, Katherine Boyle, Josh Wolfe, and Jake DeWitte 

Huge thank you to our sponsors:

For the full list of resources referenced in this show: https://ageofmiracles.co/ 

Subscribe to Not Boring to get weekly doses of tech and business strategy, straight to your inbox: https://www.notboring.co/

Follow our hosts:

Timestamps:

This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties, where experts talk to experts about tech, business, culture, and more. 

Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Jake Salyers. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg. 

• Trust people when they tell you what their problems are, but don’t what they think the solution is
• Go “back to the future” in your research; you will discover promising ideas that were discussed in the past but have since been discarded 
• Care more about how other people will evaluate the impact of your work, rather than just doing what feels good to you 
• If America is going to be a nation that rewards and promotes innovation, then it should be steering people in that direction
• If you have unconventional ideas, you can create a large impact by forcing those ideas onto people and systems that exist in conventional institutions
• Impactful businesses are rarely built on the idea of doing something a little better or a little cheaper
• Problems emerged and have persisted in the national security industry as a result of a broken incentive structure
• “We have learned a lesson: Don’t try to defend countries that aren’t willing to defend themselves.” – Palmer Luckey 
• Anduril will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year, as we make tens of billions of dollars a year
• If AGI enables the capability to create dangerous things, then it will likely also enable the capability to defend against those dangerous things

My guest today is Palmer Luckey. Palmer is the founder of Defense company Anduril Industries, which makes next-generation military technology for the US and its allies. Since bringing the company to life in 2017, Palmer and Anduril have disrupted the established order in the Defense industry. Prior to Anduril, Palmer founded Oculus VR, a virtual reality business that he sold to Facebook for $2 billion.

Listen to Patrick's Business Breakdown with Anduril CEO.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. 

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

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