Podcast Monday (10/23/2023)
This Week’s Favorites
Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal on Art of Investing
Ben: In my life it has been really important to always be doing a side project. And every single job I've ever gotten was because of the side project I was working on concurrently with my previous job…I think the pattern between all of my side projects is that it was always additive to the job, and that's why I got a lot of leeway to do it…Those experiences made me better at my job, and I think that translated all the way through to this day, me doing investing in early-stage start-ups is so massively advantaged by Acquired. The fact that 300,000 people listen to every episode means I get tremendous access to high-quality information about the topics we're studying. And usually, the topics we're studying are in markets where there's also interesting start-ups being built. So I think your side project can be a force multiplier on your day job, too.
David: I don't know what inning we're in of the Internet now, but it's not the first. And there's so much pressure out there on the Internet, on social media platforms to be like everyone else. Even creators at the highest levels, we still get all the time, why don't you do this, why don't you do this like other people? There's pressure to be like everything else out there…that pressure is just intense. And because of that, it has also never been more true that doing your own thing is the path to success or the path to differentiation. And differentiation is becoming increasingly rare because of that.
John Fio on Infinite Loops with Jim O'Shaughnessy
If you want to have good ideas, you have to do good and true things that not a lot of people are willing to do. A good idea is easy. A good big idea is hard. A good big idea that's different is really, really hard. And so, you have to be doing something different. You have to have a really good sense of what is right and wrong, and then you have to be able to have almost no ego or self to be able to recognize a thing that exists in the world that people are reacting to…I had no plans or no expectations of being in Japan. And all of a sudden 24 hours, classic, basic American boy, boom, you're in Japan, you're seeing a rock garden. I didn't have time to understand what a Japanese rock garden was. I see this thing, I think it's a stupid American beanbag. And then all of a sudden I'm like, ‘Whoa, wait, what if I reinvented a beanbag to look like that, to have that experience of a monk meditating in a Japanese rock garden? I'm going to build this whole idea around trying to recreate a product that's going to give everyone that moment.’ And that was the birth of Moon Pod, which again, that is a weird mix of an amalgamation of what happened in my brain and in the world to have this mix of a weird moment in that Japanese rock garden, I mistake it for being a beanbag, and now all of a sudden now I have literally the biggest beanbag company in America.
Peter Keefe on RWH with William Green (We Study Billionaires feed)
When you're alone in the woods, the view of the mountains, it can inspire in you an understanding that there are timeless things. The mountains don't change, not in ways that are observable over short periods of time. You can see a market places taking place on the floor of the forest. There's competition for resources. There's winners and there's losers. We see echoes of what we're doing in our business life every day. In the forest, there's good business models and there's bad business models…My analogy that I learned from the lifetime in the woods is apex predators hunt rarely. But when they do, they take down big game. I mean, lions sleep or lie around 22 or 23 hours a day and they don't feed often, but when they do, they feed big. I try to apply that analogy to the investment process. We don't feed often, but we try to feed big when we do…I have a bunch of coyotes on my place. They don't hunt unless they have an enormous, overwhelming advantage. They're an example of a good business model. That's how you ought to invest, it’s when you have an enormous, overwhelming advantage. Those opportunities come along infrequently.
Tyler Cowen on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
I think all other tings equal I would prefer the people who are less educated and have better intuition. Most of all, I want people to have both. The great thing about education these days, it’s not so closely tied to schooling. It may or may not be but you can learn from the internet. It’s just easier to meet the people you can learn from…formal schooling mattering less, to me, is a big advance.
[Advice for 20 year olds]: look at just doing your own thing like someone like Mr. Beast or yourself for that matter. It’s very hard to just categorize your profession. There’s ways you could describe Mr. Beast, Youtuber of course, or you produce music. But it’s something also bigger, different, and more diverse than that. And I would look for some kind of job in that manner that would be hard to describe in advance.
Rick: When you ask a question, are you looking for the answer to your question or are you interested in seeing where it goes?
Tyler: I’m looking for a better question. I’m not sure how many questions have answers. I mean, a bunch do like what’s two plus two, that’s four. But we know those answers, right? So I think we ought to be looking for better questions and always trying to revise and not get too caught up in quote-unquote the answer.