Some of what I listened to this week. With some notes.
Chris Best founded Substack, which makes it easy to create subscription newsletters. In part of this interview, he talks about how social media has become this thing that you’re addicted to but often times wish it was better. He describes the information diet and how he wants to give people choice:
“But our job is not to sit here and make you eat your vegetables and say, you know, you should be reading high-fiber information dense scientific reading and nothing else. Our job is to let to put the decision back in your hands and let you make it as your best self. So instead of deciding what you’re going to spend your time on by, you know doing one more scroll through your Twitter feed as you’re about to fall asleep and clicking on the thing that you know that pokes your lizard brain the hardest we like to take a step back and look at your life and think.”
Pat Flynn and Dan John discuss fat loss. Movement guidance: High intensity followed by long walks. Nutrition guidance: More protein, more fiber. Plenty of plans will get you to something like that, so it’s a matter of seeing what works for you from there.
Shaan and Sam talk about how they go about generating startup ideas. Some concepts mentioned: James Altucher’s tip for writing 10 ideas a day, looking for old solutions and applying them to new problems, and reverse engineering things (and actually going and just talking to people about it!)
Kevin Systrom talks about Instagram and has the full experience of taking a startup from a pivot of another idea through to selling it and now talking about it with some separation after leaving Facebook.
They also revisit his podcast appearance nearly a decade ago to discuss what he thinks about the advice turned out to be correct. He’d double down on the importance of people.
And he has some advice for his younger self as well: enjoy it a little more and relax.
In 2012, Daniel Ek talks about starting Spotify. It needed to be better than pirated music. Since then, Netflix has made streaming movies better than pirating movies and then moved into original content. Spotify made streaming music better than pirating music. And now they’re moving into original content by getting exclusive podcasts. Ear domination.
This is a great one because Seth gives a stock answer for the “talk about your failures” where it’s the sort of “my rough drafts are failures”. The host starts suggesting Seth’s failures are all in private (mostly referring to the blog).Seth then starts listing off his private failures—he even tried like selling videos with footage of aquariums.
I’m going to interrupt you. This is your lizard brain talking; you’re looking for an excuse, right? I started more than 100 businesses before I had one that really worked. I was three weeks away from bankruptcy for six years in a row. I went window shopping in restaurants. I launched a video tape with fish swimming back and forth for people who couldn’t have an aquarium. I had a business selling light bulbs door-to-door to raise money for marching bands. There’s a really long list of failures.
Great solo episode that goes over a written list of different ways to get the most out of your workout. Lots of tactics worth trying out. (As always: consistency is key!.)