This Week’s Favorites
Founders AMA #43 [Subscription Required]
James Sexton: Divorce Lawyer on Lex Fridman #396
Clocking in at nearly four hours, this one is a doozy. It’s well worth the investment and it’s packed with wisdom, humor, and courtroom stories throughout.
We have been encouraged culturally to criticize people we’re in long-term relationships with…And I think that is an incredibly toxic message to send to people, that this is how we should be relating to our partner…The successful relationships I’ve seen are where people are just cheering for their partner, where they’re thick as thieves, where there is just this feeling of, man, they like each other. They got each other’s back like you wouldn’t believe.
Founders AMA #43: How to integrate into the startup community [Subscription Required]
If you’re fundraising or looking for a job, target an audience of one:
When I was thinking about this question, I thought about a podcast I did a long time ago on this guy named Henry Kaiser. No one's read this book. It's incredible. I actually saw it in Charlie Munger's library when I was when I was at his house.
It's episode 66 of Founders. I will eventually reread the book because the guy founded over a hundred different companies. He was as famous in his day as Elon is today. He built the Hoover Dam.
When he was young and poor and inexperienced, he needed a job…So what a lot of people do when they apply for jobs, they just spam their resume out and say, ‘I don't know why this isn't working.’ It's because you took the lowest common denominator. You did nothing.
And so what Kaiser did was he decided to pick one person, the person he wanted to work for the most, and concentrated on him relentlessly and that's the way he successfully got a job. He didn't pick 100 people. He picked one.
And so you don't necessarily have to pick one, but let's say you pick five. And then here's the thing: the way that these people are on podcasts, they're social media, I would read every single thing they've done. I would take notes on it. I would listen to every single podcast. I would literally build a dossier on how they think and what they're working on.
And then the next step is how do I serve them? I wouldn't hit them up like, ‘Hey, I took a bunch of notes and everything you did.’ I would say, ‘Hey, you did this podcast three years ago and 30 minutes in you mentioned this thing. And oh, here I did some research. I actually found a bunch of resources that might actually help you in this thing you’re interested in.
Sam Parr on How I Write with David Perell
David: One of the things I've noticed is that good CEOs are sloganeers. The average person if you become friends with them they tell you different stories all the time. Good CEOs tell you the same story over and over and over again. And what I'm noticing is they're doing exactly what you're saying—they're telling the same story and they're just tweaking a word here, tweaking a word there. They're so in love with their project that they see every social interaction as a chance to test out their pitch.
Sam: Well it's propaganda. When you read about great cult leaders, even great normal leaders like U.S. presidents, it's repetitive, it's propaganda, it's manipulation. Hopefully you're manipulating people to do good things, in some regard it's it's bad things. But I love like reading about how people manipulate one another with words and one of the common threads is you have to repeat shit constantly. You say the same stuff over and over and over again and you have to use memorable phrasing.
Haralabos Voulgaris on Win-Win with Liv Boeree
How a top gambler clashed with the Dallas Mavericks and then bought a Spanish fútbol club. So many gems on biases and how to improve decision making:
They would see a guy with a wide open three but three seconds into the shot clock. They'd freeze frame it and go around the room, ‘Is that a good shot or a bad shot?’
Wide open shot, three points, from a great shooter. And they'd be like, ‘Ah it just breaks the spirit of the team if that doesn’t go in.’ They create all these stories for why they think things are happening. And they’d get to me and I’d be like, ‘What the actual fuck are you guys talking about? That’s a wide open three-point shot from a guy who shoots probably 43% from there. You're not getting any better than that, you're out of your fucking mind, let's move on.’
Now everyone wants to take early transition threes. We had data that showed you want to take early shots in the shot clock because you have a clock, you have to shoot within 24 seconds. Imagine knowing that you have to take a shot within 24 seconds and someone thinking that an early good shot is bad. Do you know you're gonna get a better shot than that later? As the time keeps on ticking it's like when you're playing chess with a timer.
No way, I would have clicked on a 4 hour podcast without a recommendation, but Sexton is full of great ideas and observations. Thanks for sharing.