Hiding in plain sight
Podcasting is the orthogonal disruptor desperately needed in the education system.
You have world class experts curating knowledge and teaching their asses off on a weekly basis for free.
Audio allows you to listen while your eyes are distracted by other activities such as driving or walking. Consider yourself Hermione Granger with a Time Turner around your neck.
Increasing playback speed allows ingestion to be nearly as efficient as reading.
Speech to Text is now reliable enough to create searchable databases and LLM overlays are starting to appear.
The intimate format—long-form, unscripted, largely unedited—creates deep, parasocial relationships. I’ve spent more time with Patrick O’Shaughnessy over the past seven years than anybody outside my wife and two kids. This trust and accountability helps maintain the momentum to compound knowledge over time.
Podcasts also facilitate real world friendships as your queue serves as an interest graph. If somebody listens to both The Acquired Podcast and Ryen Russillo’s Life Advice segment, we are guaranteed to have a fun conversation.
Contrary to popular belief, we don’t have too many podcasts. That’s like saying we have too many apps or websites. We’re just impatiently awaiting advancements in search and discovery.
This Week’s Favorites
Jesse Itzler on My First Million
Marc Andreessen on How I Write with David Perell
Paul Buser and Rick Buhrman on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Bill Simmons on SmartLess
Founders #323 Jimmy Buffett
Jesse Itzler's Exact Playbook For Creating HIT AFTER HIT
When you start out people buy into stories, momentum, and people often more than the products. I was the business plan and I would have paid the Knicks $10,000 to say they were my customer because once I had the Knicks those phone calls to get the other sports teams became very easy and that became my calling card.
I serviced the hell out of him. I did what everybody listening would do but I did 30% more. So when he went to Mexico he expected me to return his call and every DM and all that, of course. But when he went to Mexico he didn't expect a list of Pediatricians that I vetted in case his kids got sick. He didn't expect me to make reservations every night at 8pm during spring break in Mexico in case he and his wife wanted to go to dinner. And after a couple of months of doing what he didn't expect me to do, he gave me the magic word, he gave me a referral. And that was rinse and repeat for five years.
I like to ride my bike, I like to run, I like to swim, I like to speak in public, I like to be around my family and friends. Whatever that costs me is what I’m going to spend on it.
So many more fun stories including cornering the muffin inventory at TED and convincing Matt Damon to climb a coconut tree.
Marc Andreessen: It’s Time To Write
What a lot of people do when they try to write is they end up writing in a very different voice than how they talk. And it ends up being sort of stilted and unnatural. And at least for the interesting people I know, the best form of their writing is when they're writing the exact same way they talk. It's exactly like having a conversation with them.
I’m trained in marketing and the whole art of marketing is you have to punch through. The world is awash with media of every kind. And so for anybody doing anything that they want to get out, it’s gotta be punch and aggressive.
[Pairs well with Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath]
The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power. Independent of their actual formal role in an organization or in the world, there are so few people who will just write down the thing. And so we see this at companies all the time, which is one of the ways you find the up and comers at a tech company is, okay, who wrote down the plan? And that doesn't mean they came up with everything, and it doesn't mean that they had all the ideas, but they're actually able to organize their thoughts and have the energy and the motivation and skill to be able to communicate in a written form. That actually stands out.
David: You were the reason that college was ruined for me because I was in North Carolina and I went to these lectures that weren't very good…I used to go back to my room and I'd be like, why would I go to a lecture with some random professor if I could read your tweets in my room? And then I ended up finding YouTube and that was part of the thing that set me on this journey of saying, hey, you can use the internet to learn. And then I was like, wait, this is a two way medium. You can use the internet to write and meet people. And that was the greatest thing in the world for me.
Marc: And both of those realities are still hanging out there. And we still have this giant education system that doesn't take it into account. And we still have this giant publishing system that doesn't take it into account.
There are a fair number of people now who I follow on Twitter where I realize that they are geniuses based on a single Tweet…You can convey so much in 140 characters where you’re just like, okay, this person is really special.
Find Your X, Nurture Your N: Paul Buser & Rick Buhrman
The default that most of society will leave you with is the sense that your learning stage is your first 20 to 30 years. There's all these classic frameworks—learn, earn, return. And we just don't finally believe in that. All the people that we admire the most—their stages are learn, learn some more, keep learning, die at their desk.
We just keep coming back to the importance of studying the greats. That's why it's been so important for us to integrate traditional faculty alongside this modern MBA faculty of which you are one. David Senra, what he's doing with Founders Podcast, what Ben and David are doing with Acquired. Because you all have become, in our minds, the great historians of entrepreneurship and of company building.
Bill Simmons on SmartLess
In 2006 I made a decision that every single year I want to try to add something and take a swing at something. I don’t want to be in the same spot at the end of the next year that I’m in right now. So in 2007, that was when I started 30 for 30, I sent the memo. That was when I started writing my basketball book and that was when I started doing my podcast. And then the next year after that, it was like, all right, how can I keep going? And that led to Grantland in 2011. And then just TV in 2012. It was just each year, what can I do? I don’t want to be in the same spot.
Founders #323 Jimmy Buffett
He knew that true success took time. That's what's wrong with the world these days. Nobody wants to put in the time it takes to be legendary. Mythology is not fast food.
Amazing 👏 thank you Steve!