The Brandon Zhang Show

On today’s episode, I talk with Ruben Harris founder of Career Karma, an amazing platform that connects people to coding boot camps and other networks in the tech field. Ruben also hosts, Breaking Into Startups, covering the untold stories of people thriving in Silicon Valley despite coming from unique and different backgrounds. In the episode we get into the future of education, the mission behind Career Karma and the 4th industrial revolution.  

Links:  

Career Karma
Ruben's Twitter
Ruben's Instagram
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways:  

1. Career Karma is the easiest way to find a job training program online, we serve these blue-collar workers between 25 and 35 years old, who are looking to get a job in tech. And then we offer career pathways and technical and tonic or nontech roles. So you can become a salesperson, the engineer, designer, data, scientists design, all these different things.
2. College is really about community and not necessarily about education. I'm not saying that they're not great educators, I think college is not going away. I'm not a bear on college. I do think that a lot of them are going to sit down because of bloated cost structures. But I think that at the end of the day, College is a social experience that helps you become a better human. 
3. But what I would say that's positive is, schools are really good at teaching, very bad at admissions, very bad at, at retention, very bad at job search, very bad at Alumni Engagement.
4. There are two major trends, that COVID has accelerated. Number one, the unbundling of higher education. And number two, increased demand for skills training. And the desire for the demand for skills training is because people need a job right
5. I think another thing that the government can do is create incentives around apprenticeships and internships. I think that's I think that can be actually a really good way to align government employers and the training programs because currently, a lot of companies don't have a lot of incentives to create on-ramps for students. But if they can get incentives for creating, like entryways for juniors, just like you have in like Germany and places all over the world, that can actually be big, we actually don't do that well, with apprenticeships and internships in the United States.

Today, I am talking with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, the Number 1 New York Times Best Seller which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. James has been writing on his blog since 2012 and has over 800,000 people subscribed to his 3-2-1 newsletter. On today’s episode, we talk about habits association with identity, how to apply mental models to our life, and why the equal odds rule will inspire you to publish more.  

Links:

1. James's Website
2. James's Twitter
3. James's Newsletter
4. My Website
5. My Twitter

Show Notes:  

But I think the real reason that habits matter is they reshape your sense of self, they kind of give you evidence of a new identity or story, they help forge your self-esteem and your identity.

And so you start with this, what is the magical outcome? What does that future ideal future state look like? And then you have to come back and wrestle with reality.

So the idea behind a margin of safety is just to have a buffer for uncertainty.

A resilient mindset, that's a huge margin of safety against failure, because you're willing to try things and you know that if you fail, so what you'll be fine. 

One of the key questions to ask, and I think this actually is a great skill, for writers as well, is, what are the limitations of this model? Or what are the limitations of this argument, if you're gonna lay out an argument, it's important to know where it stops where it fails. 

The short summary is that have read every paper that an academic publishes, has roughly equal odds of becoming popular cited, or whatever. And the key factor that determined whether you know, and academic kind of rose to the top of their field, or whatever was the number of publications they had was the number of times they showed up the number of shots on goal.

One, the internet is much more platform-driven now than it was before. So it used to be kind of everybody was dipping their toes into most of the different places. But you know, it hadn't really become siloed in some big sense

On today’s episode I am interviewing Gaby Goldberg, Gaby is currently an investor at ChapterOne and studies Symbolic Systems, a major combining computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology at Stanford University. Chapter One is an early stage product fund focused on the future of work, developer tools and subscription businesses. On today’s episode, Gaby and I talk about curation in the age of information overload, how her background in philosophy influences how she analyzes companies and the Chapter One Product Club and Scouting Program.  

Links:

1. Chapter One
2. Gaby's Medium
3. Gaby's Twitter
4. My Website
5. My Twitter

Show Notes: 

For me, I'm kind of watching two different trends just personally. So first, I'm watching kind of the explosion of content and the growth of the Creator economy. So kind of along the lines of Li Jin’s passion economy thesis. And so around that I'm really excited to see new tools for creators to collaborate and monetize their passion. So I guess some examples there are Stir, which is like creator tools, Scout, which kind of gamifies fandom and allows you to put kind of all your fans in one place and then Coil which is sort of like a universal Patreon for the web.

So I was deep into constitutional law for four years and thought I wanted to go to law school. So that's how I entered college. As a philosophy major and was writing a ton of papers. And then, you know, obviously my major kind of shifted since then. But now I've channeled all of that love for writing into tech and business strategy.

A cool piece of advice I got a long time ago that I always think about is any section of the newspaper but just read, you know what catches your eye. And once you find patterns and like, where your eye always goes, then you're going to know what you're interested in.

And by the time it came time for me to pick my major, it totally fit into symbolic systems, which, as you said, is CS philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. So within that, I picked the human-computer interaction concentration. And in general, I just really like the philosophy and ethics behind how people interact and how people grow through technology and computational systems.

And there are so many aspects of college that, you know, affect you in such profound ways, but have nothing to do with the classes you take. So maybe it's, you know, the person who lives next to you and your dorm, or you know, someone you randomly bump into or meet in a random class. And it's all these little things that you totally can't plan for, but end up affecting your college career so much.

One thing that we've forgotten is the power of forgetting. We've talked about there are a huge cost and overload, but your brain is actually really amazing. And its power to forget things and prune away from the things that are less important and less valuable to you. And so if you allow that to happen, then you're kind of left with your own grounding values and the own topics that, you know, like resonate with you the most. 

Today, I am talking with Polina Marinova, founder of the Profile, a media company focused on improving your content diet by producing in-depth profiles on some of the most interesting people in the world. I read it every single Sunday morning. Polina has built a community of tens of thousands of readers who regularly attend webinars, Q&As and other workshops. On today's episode we talk about her viral article on what she has learned running the profile full time after leaving Fortune, how speaking different languages influence our mental frameworks, and the story of a janitor who made billions for Frito-Lay.

Links:  

1. The Profile  
2. Follow Polina on Twitter
3. Follow me on Twitter
4. Go check out my Website

Show Notes:  

I just did a profile dossier, which is just the deep dive into an individual person on Troy Carter. And he talked about the very early days of building Lady Gaga brand. And basically, Lady Gaga started, she didn't have any fans, obviously. So their philosophy was, let's find the first 50 people who like your music, and they found those first super, super intense, loyal people in, in clubs, LGBTQ clubs in New York. So they double down on serving those people and making sure they were happy and they were satisfied with, like, what she was offering them. 

Every time before I start reading A profile, I asked myself the question like, what, what do I want to learn from this person? And what do I hope to learn from this person? If approval doesn't really answer that question, it's not one to include in the newsletter because it's just a superficial thing of, here's what this person is doing. 

But a lot of people are losing trust in institutions. And some of those institutions include large media organizations. So the reason that people are seeing such a rise in newsletters is because they're able to fill that nuance where Fox and CNN cannot.  

I noticed myself thinking differently depending on the language I'm speaking. And I was like I wonder if this is the case for other people. 

Don't confuse motion with progress. A lot of people are just like spinning in circles really, really fast. They're not going anywhere. So to me, it's like slow and steady, and sometimes, like, add something new when you feel there's a need to be met, but otherwise, stop moving that much. 

There's multiple layers to each human, but also the fact that you can reinvent yourself and there's no label to define who you are, he was not a janitor. He was a man with an idea who made a company billions of dollars. 

Today, I am talking with Steve Schlafman, a recovering VC, current Angel Investor and the founder of High Output, a boutique leadership development company based in New York City. Steve wants to help help entrepreneurs bring their boldest visions to life and help them evolve into extraordinary leaders. On today’s show, we discuss the future of New York City and the corresponding startup scene, why coaching will become commonplace by 2030 and what it means to be a human centric CEO. In the middle of the episode Steve’s baby daughter even makes an appearance.

Links: 

1. Schlaf’s Website
2. Schlaf’s Twitter
3. My Twitter
4. My Website

Show Notes: 

Around that time, I think there were a number of really important things that happened in New York, but coinciding with that that was the rise of social, the rise of mobile, Amazon Web Services made it really cheap for companies to get started. And you had the generation that grew up on that, like, effectively grew up on the web was now starting to come of age where they were becoming the entrepreneurs.

And I don't I deliberately use the word personal growth and not self help, I believe is like really starting to gain more momentum. So I think that's the first one. I think the second one is that while therapy is becoming destigmatized, which I think is a very good thing, I do believe that coaching is seen as something that's, in some ways, like a little bit more practical and grounded.

I also believe that the word coaches now becoming, it's being watered down because there are so many different types of coaches. But I think it is be starting to become a lot more accepted in society. And what I believe is going to ultimately happen is that it's you're not just you don't you're not just a coach, right? You're a coach and something else, right? So like for me, I don't have the myself as a coach, right? I view myself as a coach. I'm an advisor. I'm a former operator, I'm a former VC. I'm a husband, I'm a meditator. 

He [Ben Horowitz] wrote it [Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO] around the time that Larry Page took over firm from Eric Schmidt at Google, and basically was saying that Eric Schmidt presided over Google during, you know, peacetime. And so during peacetime, you know, requires like a certain kind of leader, whereas in wartime, and it requires a different kind of leader and the reason why Google was transitioning into war, because there was a platform shift from, you know, desktop and web to mobile, and then that shift requires basically a new operating procedure.

Today, I am talking with Anthony Pompliano, also known as Pomp. Pomp shares his knowledge of finance, business, and bitcoin to 350,000 followers on Twitter, 50,000 newsletter subscribers, and millions of listeners on his podcast, educating people on all the things money that we were not taught in school. In the episode, we talk about how the US economy can move out of the recession, how Pomp led a $50 million series C for BlockFi, the keys to building an audience, the secret behind his prolific production.  

Links:  

1. Pomp's Twitter
2. Pomp's Newsletter
3. Pomp's Podcast
4. My Twitter
5. My Website

Show Notes:  

I think that it's a foregone conclusion at this point that Bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency. Ultimately, what happens is a fiat currency gets devalued.  

So ultimately, where I think we end up is we're going to end up in a kind of a global competition of currencies that are all digitized and the competition happens at the monetary policy level. 

But people forget that kind of the rise of global reserve currency happens in two stages. The first is that of a store of value, and then as a medium of exchange.  

I worked on the growth team at Facebook, and I've just helped a lot of people grow audiences before. And so because of that kind of experience, and that the knowledge I had of how some of these algorithms work, I knew that that was a key factor, right? And one of the big things that people really worry about is, you know, I don't want to overwhelm my audience. And so they say, Oh, I want to post once a day or twice a day. In reality, what happens is that the the actual algorithm itself is governing.

If you said to me, you know, hey, I want to build an audience in eSports. Great, right, the first thing that I would do is I would create an account that simply just updated people on player rankings and who wins what games, right, the other thing I would do is I would do long threads, like the best players and kind of tell their stories. I'm sure a lot of people don't know that stuff. And like you can just think like all this content that you could come up with and sharing it in and a way that one kind of educates people, surprises people, entertains people.

People hate when I say it but I literally just outwork people. I mean, that's ultimately what it comes down to right today, I started meetings and calls at 7am. And I won't stop until about 830 tonight. 

The podcast has nothing to do with me. Literally nothing to do with me. Right? It has to do with the guests that come on, and those guests do a fantastic job educating the audience. 

Today, I am talking with David Perell, an astute writer, journalistic podcaster, and the instructor of the online course, Write of Passage. I am consistently amazed by David's clear, original insights and his prolific production. In today's episode, we analyze the journey of Write of Passage, why colleges should double down on the liberal arts, and the future role of writers and intellectuals in the attention economy. 

Links:  

1. David’s Website 
2. David’s Twitter 
3. David’s Podcast  
4. My Twitter
5. My Website

Timestamps: 

2:10 – How I Came into Contact with David 

2:23 – What Write of Passage is all About 

20:31 – Why Higher Educational Institutions that Pivoted to Online Learning Failed 

21:16 – David’s Experience in a Spartan Race 

24:30 – David’s Experiment with Tiktok Houses for Intellectuals 

27:16 – The Benefits of Writing Online 

30:17 – Substack a Rising Tide for People Leaving the Media World 

30:52 – A Writer’s Role in the Attention Economy and Information Age 

38:09 – The Polymathic Nature of Online Learning 

40:36 – Colleges and Liberal Arts 

56:10 – David’s Upcoming Essay About His Podcast 

57:34 – Productivity and Established Systems 

59:58 – Creative Excellence through Iteration

Show Notes:  

When I started Write of Passage I actually did not believe in it that much, I always believed in the mission that writing online is an amazing way to accelerate your career, make friends and improve the quality of your thinking but I always thought that there was not big enough demand for people who want to write online. 

There was a talk from 2012 that Patrick Collison gave, the founder of Stripe, and in the talk one of the things he says is that companies focus too much on doing things that are necessarily going to scale when they are first starting.  

What I’ve learned is that it is always worth obsessing over what our students want at any point in the process even if that means by doing that thing now we are not building things that lead to scale in the long-term.  

The thing is that we have not made tremendous progress is in types of internet and online learning that are community-oriented. 

There isn’t really a power-law business model for people that write online and that should not be the case, because the problem is that a lot of the benefits of writing online are unpriced and they show up in ancillary ways of making money.  

One of the things I strongly believe is that good writers will be some of the wealthiest citizens of the 21st century.  

If you take seriously that we are actually in an attention economy, that we are actually in an Information Age, well then shouldn’t the wealthiest people be the people who control the attention and control the dissemination of information 

Dont just think of writing as information, think of writing as community.  

Online learning is polymathic in nature in ways that at least modern education isn’t.  

What I find so perverse about the system is that we have said, we are going to expand access to college but we are not going to expand access to education.  

The goal is to make liberal arts much more intense for the small portion of the population that wants to study it and not require others to study it and get rid of a lot of the specialization which is not relevant for most people.  

Today, I will be talking with Oliver Cantin, the owner of two successful online agencies within marketing and health coaching. Oliver has over 13,000 followers on Twitter and has over 15 years of experience in sales and marketing. On the episode, we discuss Oliver’s journey and failures as he ventured into online business, the one key skill that everyone needs to learn, and why you should prioritize one stream of income first.  

Links: 

1. Oliver’s Twitter 
2. My Twitter
3. My Website

Show Notes: 

When I say that I work for an agency, we actually do not focus on branding or social media posts, we are creating funnels to compel people to take a desired action.  

I first learned about online business through the lens of tech startups, this is going back around ten, fifteen years. I wasn’t a coder but I figured I could be a co-founder of a start-up but I always felt that I needed an idea that would disrupt anything, which is not true. 

I think the biggest mistake that people make is that everyone wants to be a social media marketing agency, but if you google that you will find hundreds in your area, they are highly commoditized and they do not focus on a specific problem. 

The people that are most successful in business in general they are not successful because of their credentials, they are successful because of their drive, their successful because they can relentlessly find problems to solve. 

Problems are profit in disguise, learn to love problems. 

Sometimes I see people that are reading 10 copywriting books or taking 10 courses on how to buy ads, but at the end of the day, they are not doing anything. 

In reality, few things are actually saturated. 

It is all about perspective, one person may go to the food court and say, “this is saturated.” Someone else may go to the same food court and say, “there is so much opportunity here.” 

Often people want to learn from people that are 6 months ahead, a year ahead of you when creating an info product or learning how to do coaching. If I speak with Tony Robbins about a coaching business, he is so far ahead that I do not know if he remembers everything he did twenty or thirty years ago. 

There is also an element of personality when it comes to saturation. If I launch a Facebook ads course, there will some people that will want to learn from me because of my story and my content, and there will be others who want to learn from someone else, and that is totally ok! 

I would not pursue multiple streams of income until my first stream becomes a river. 

I like Twitter as a platform because the viewers are logged in, this is different from Youtube where a lot of your viewers are guests and it can be hard to capture their attention and views may provide an inflated story or metric. 

Ask yourself what are your lead indicators, and find the ones that drive the most results. 

Treat twitter as a two way communication mechanism. 

I work from home now and my water cooler is Telegram group chats and my Happy Hour is Zoom calls. 

Today, I am chatting with Rishi Tripathy, a recent Duke Graduate who will be joining On Deck. This summer, Rishi worked as an apprentice to Steve Schlafman, the founder of High Output and Angel Investor. On the episode, we will talk about the meaning of Ikigai, what Rishi learned during his apprenticeship, the future of education, and what it means to create a new user manual. 

Links:

1. Rishi’s Newsletter 

2. Rishi’s Twitter 

3. My Twitter 

4. My Website  

Show Notes:  

I’m a big believer that you can admire people for very specific things, and not necessarily agree with their entire person.  

I read the book Saddartha recently on his [Naval’s] recommendation and its like one of the most influential things I have done in terms of understanding my sense of self.

Let the seekers seek.  

For me, the meaningfulness around Ikigai is that it can be broader than your work, your personal life, your relationships, your friendships. It is sort of this mindset that transcends any boundaries that you set in your life.  

It’s [Ikigai] not something you need to always be thinking about. You do not need to always think about is this tying back to x. But if you are not feeling your best or if you feel like something is off, it should make you ask “is this something that is in line with what I want to be doing?”  

The newsletter is a way for me to scale myself.  

I like to explore the relationship between people and the things around them. Some examples include friendship and how intention plays into them. I think games are a big part of my life, asking how do board games, video games etc. how do they reflect a small part of life or a broader life principle.  

For the apprenticeship, I actually found it just by scrolling through Twitter. I was at home, doing Zoom University and I was like “wow the summers going to be really boring.” My original plan was to travel for a while after graduating but I saw this role and thought I have heard really great things about Steve, he is super well-respected within the community, I might as well give it a shot.  

If you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing a job then you might as well put 4 hours getting the job.  

It was sort of a behind the curtains look at how startups grow, raise money, and how founders and investors view the whole process. For the time being, I see myself more on building a company side of things, but going through this experience has helped me in that aspect as well by being on the other side of the table so to speak.   

A personal user manual is something that you would hand to your colleague on the first day of work to tell them how they should work with you.  

When you are putting so much effort into a product for people. It is pretty low marginal cost and pretty high marginal benefit to spend 20 minutes talking about why you did it and sharing your process.  

The High Output Library is a way to serve as the center of gravity for resources for early-stage startup founders. It is a page built in Notion that is filled with high signal, tactical advice compiled around the internet.  

The creator economy is growing and more people are creating, the attention economy is also growing and more people are vying for your attention, so you will have to find a way to cut through that noise to find what content is right for you.  

I wouldn’t say that I derived most of the value from college from the classroom. In all of these Zoom University models, so to say, the most important thing that is being replicated is the classroom experience.  

Today, I am talking with Packy McCormick, author of the Not Boring newsletter. Packy aims to make events in business and strategy “not boring,” interjecting pop culture references, using a conversational tone and the public has loved it, in the last couple of months, the Not Boring newsletter has risen to over 7800 subscribers and is one the fastest growing newsletters I know. On today's episode, Packy and I will discuss his writing process, what it is like being a part of the Type House and the Not Boring Syndicate, a groundbreaking and unique strategy for founders to raise capital and drive awareness.  

Links:

1. Not Boring Newsletter
2. Packy’s Twitter
3. My Website
4. My Twitter

Show Links:  

Type House Memo

Conjuring Scenius:

Show Notes:  

My combination of the two [Ben Thompson and Bill Simmons] and what I am going for is that sometimes business strategy, economics and finance can be pretty dry, but I think that if you weave in a fun style and pop culture references you can make it work for a lot of people. And that is my goal for the newsletter is that someone who has worked in tech for twenty years can get a lot out of it and someone who is maybe in college or in a different industry can understand the concepts.  

For me, guest posts are more about delivering great content that I otherwise would not know about to the Not Boring audience.  

I keep a running list of topics but I rarely go to that list and find something I am interested about because everything moves so quickly that there’s going to be something more interesting to write about.  

[Writing Conjuring Scenius] was probably the hardest and most rewarding writing experience I have had yet. I had to pick a topic in December and stick with it for months and months and months, through a lot of really bad drafts.  

Making sure that there is actually a compelling argument and thread that goes throughout the whole piece. When you are writing something that long in particular, depending what process you are using, you gather a whole lot of information and you think about it for a really long time. So there is a temptation to kind of lump them in together.  

That reminded me of a concept that Andy Matuschak told me about which is scenius. It is this idea of a communal genius and the term was coined by Brian Eno in the late 2000s.  

There’s going to be massive opportunity for people to figure out how to educate large groups of people remotely. Really great schools thrive, vocational schools will still thrive, but there is going to a remixing of what an education looks like.  

Scenius is no longer geographically constrained, because we are going to figure out how to make it pretty high fidelity to work with each other, whether you are in New York, Tokyo, or Mumbai.  

I think competition has a role, there’s no leader board in the group [Type House], but I would put myself at the bottom half and is working my way up so I always want to make sure I can provide quality content for everyone.  

I dont think there any [on Type House’s Goals]. I think this is something you see with Scenius is that it is just a bunch of people that are really nerdy and they are getting together in the beginning without necessarily a real goal.  

Today I got to feature Reuben from the Marcy Lab school, and even if a hundred people unsubscribe, if we get to place a couple of his students into tech jobs it will be so much more meaningful.