LaBossiere Podcast Alex LaBossiere
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- Business
The New Narrative
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#52 - Erik Torenberg
Erik Torenberg is a technology entrepreneur and investor.
Presently, he’s the founder of Turpentine. Previously, he was the chairman of On Deck, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, and first employee at Product Hunt.
0:00 - Intro
5:08 - On Investing vs Operating and Being a Player
7:34 - Trust and Direct Distribution
10:45 - Legacy Media and the Techlash
17:24 - What is Turpentine
18:41 - Lessons From 1000 Interviews
20:59 - The Printing Press, Barbells, and the Future of Media
25:22 - Pre-Internet Journalism and Survival of the Fittest Ideas
28:44 - Creator Monetization and Price Discrimination
34:55 - Does Media Have a Direction?
41:44 - Tailwinds and Turpentine at Scale
49:37 - Creating More Startups and Understanding Risk
54:24 - Is Entrepreneurship Founder or Market Limited?
59:04 - What Do Most People Get Wrong About Community Building?
1:01:34 - Probabilistic vs Deterministic Mindsets
1:04:29 - On Faith over Logic
1:08:06 - Modernity and God Shaped Holes
1:10:44 - The Hypocrisy of Elites
1:13:30 - Asking Erik Questions He Asks People
1:15:40 - What Should More People be Thinking About?
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#51 - Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. Johnson sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800m in 2013. Through his Project Blueprint, Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5% of 18 year olds, inflammation 66% lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.
Johnson freely shares his protocols and data publicly for everyone to use. Project Blueprint, is an endeavor to achieve humanity and earth scale cooperation starting within Self.
In 2023, Johnson launched Rejuvenation Olympics, a leaderboard assessing one's speed of aging using DNA methylation. Of the 1,750 people who have been using this state-of-the-art aging algorithm to track their progress longitudinally, Johnson ranks #1 in speed of age reduction.
Johnson is also the founder & CEO of Kernel, creator of the world’s first mainstream non-invasive neuroimaging system; and OS Fund, where he invested $100M in the predictable engineering of atoms, molecules, and organisms into companies now collectively valued over $6B. He is an outdoor adventure enthusiast, pilot, and author of children’s books, Code 7 and The Proto Project.
00:00 - Intro
3:45 - Biographies
5:03 - Zeroth Principles Thinking and Genius
6:24 - Vision for Blueprint: A 25th Century Perspective
7:50 - Blueprint, Entropy Reduction and Planet Earth
9:23 - Impact of Blueprint
10:47 - Gene Therapy and Breaking Through the Longevity Ceiling
12:06 - Living Longer and Compounding Gains
13:31 - Bryan’s Relationship With Time
14:07 - Measuring Biological vs Chronological Age
15:05 - Encouraging Adoption, Dashboards for Society and Learning How to Swim
17:49 - Enriching vs Degrading Life and the Inevitability of Computational Intelligence
21:03 - Living Forever
22:19 - Knee-Jerk Reactions
26:03 - Free Will
28:12 - Social Drivers and Early Adopters of Blueprint
30:08 - Future of Engineering Atoms, Molecules and Organisms
32:43 - Critical Questions from Longer Lifespans
33:58 - Kernel and the Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces
36:28 - Ketamine
37:47 - Storytelling, Quantifying Reality and the Extent of the Algorithm
40:03 - OS Fund, Foundational Technologies and Architecting Reality
43:38 - Trust and God Shaped Holes
46:55 - Wealth, Effectuating Change and Competing for Legacy
48:23 - What Else Would Bryan Work On?
49:25 - What Should More People be Thinking About?
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#50 - Anthony Pompliano
Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is an entrepreneur and technology investor. He runs his family office which makes private investments, along with owning majority stakes in a number of operating businesses.
Additionally, Pomp hosts popular conversations on “The Pomp Podcast,” which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Pomp also writes a letter that is read by more than 250,000 investors each morning.
Pomp’s interests lie at the intersection of finance, technology, entrepreneurship, and economics, which he tweets about extensively to his more than 1.6 million followers.
0:00 - Intro
3:11 - Incumbents and Competition in the Age of AI
5:12 - Media’s Relationship with Technology
9:48 - Individuals vs Institutions and the Future of Content
11:46 - Consensus, Truth, and Misinformation
15:47 - How to Cut Through the Noise
18:47 - The Decline of Trust in Institutions
24:10 - Balancing Optimism and Cynicism
26:46 - National Debt
33:22 - Bad Legislation, Bad Politicians, and Bad Incentives
37:54 - Growing Our Way Out of the Problem
42:19 - Autonomous Cars, Pig Heart Transplants, and How Innovation Propagates Itself
49:22 - Legislating Technology
55:04 - Increasing the Number of Entrepreneurs in Society
1:03:08 - When Better Technology Doesn’t Mean Better Outcomes
1:05:24 - Talent Allocation
1:10:56 - What Does Pomp Do Every Day?
1:19:52 - Lessons From 1300 Interviews
1:21:56 - On Fame, Audience, and Parasocial Relationships
1:29:23 - The State of Crypto
1:34:14 - Institutional Adoption of Crypto
1:37:20 - Is Slow-Moving Bureaucracy a Bug or a Feature?
1:42:02 - Remote Work and Regulatory Arbitrage
1:46:22 - Promising Cities and the Internet as an Equalizer
1:50:03 - Lessons From War
1:58:07 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?
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#49 - Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author.
He’s the author of 8 books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His next book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing, will be published by the Cato Institute in 2024.
He’s the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. He’s published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Newsweek, Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022, and appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.
0:00 - Intro
2:23 - The Most Irrational Beliefs in Society
3:43 - Why Do People Vote?
5:57 - The Most Net Positive Delusions in Society
7:30 - Bottlenecks in Democracy
9:13 - Idea Traps
13:13 - The Ideological Turing Test
15:16 - Caricatures of Political Parties
17:49 - The Case for Open Borders
21:48 - Tribalism and Social Cohesion
25:33 - Privatization and The Confluence of Cultures
26:56 - What’s the Point of Countries?
28:26 - What Values Are (Mostly) Non-negotiable?
30:27 - The Net Present Value of Immigration
33:43 - The Competition of Cultures
38:15 - Is Globalism Inevitable?
39:30 - Resources and Culture
42:49 - How to Fix Immigration
45:07 - The Case Against Education
48:48 - What is a Degree Actually Worth?
52:05 - Why is Bryan a Professor?
53:13 - The Value of Conformity in Society
55:25 - Is Learning How to Learn Real?
57:51 - Is There Value in the Liberal Arts?
29:27 - Bryan’s Approach to Learning
1:01:49 - Who Does Education Well?
1:02:49 - The Biggest Problems in Academia
1:05:47 - Should we Abolish Tenure?
1:09:32 - Why Parenting is Overrated
1:11:51 - What Kind of Parenting Has an Effect?
1:14:23 - Positive Effects of Having Kids
1:16:03 - The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation
1:18:50 - Intangible Costs of Deregulation
1:21:39 - How does Ideology Propagate Itself?
1:24:09 - If Everything’s Mimetic are Free Markets Overrated?
1:25:54 - How to Get Ideas Into the Mainstream
1:28:19 - Are Politicians Evil?
1:31:35 - The Future of Labor Markets Under Remote Work
1:34:21 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?
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#48 - Delian Asparouhov
Delian Asparouhov is the co-founder, President and Chairman of Varda Space Industries, a company building spacecraft to manufacture materials in microgravity that are difficult or impossible to produce on Earth— starting with pharmaceuticals. He’s also a Partner at Founders Fund.
Previously, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures, head of growth at Teespring, and founder of a healthcare company called Nightingale. Delian is Bulgarian, attended MIT, and likes to ski and play soccer.
0:00 - Intro
3:14 - How Does Innovation Happen?
6:23 - Varda and the No Science Allowed Rule
7:52 - A Primer on Solid State Microgravity Manufacturing
18:25 - Space Industrialization, Trading Posts, and the Chinese and Portuguese Navies
21:13 - Economic Incentives and Future Business Models in Space
24:24 - SpaceX and The Costs of Mass to Orbit
27:45 - Demand for Space Manufacturing and Varda at Scale
33:44 - Manufacturing, Servicing, Machining, and Future Markets for Space
36:42 - Incubating Companies
40:33 - When Would Varda Have Been Started Otherwise?
42:19 - The Hollywood Model of Startups
45:20 - Future of Incubations
47:47 - Media’s Role in Technology
50:39 - What Media Inspired Varda’s Founding?
52:38 - Talent, Culture, and Cementing Company Trajectory
53:57 - Narratives and Talent Recruitment
55:28 - Traits Delian Looks for in Founders
57:38 - The ‘Why Now’ When Investing
1:00:08 - Bring Non-Consensus and Right
1:02:53 - Is Varda Consensus Yet?
1:03:24 - Identifying Non-Consensus Opportunities
1:05:12 - Lessons from Founding and Investing
1:07:40 - What Skill Do You Wish You’d Developed Earlier?
1:10:11 - Immigrant Mentality
1:11:24 - Less Obvious Reasons for Success
1:12:55 - On Speed
1:14:23 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?
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#47 - Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson is a professor at George Mason University and researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
0:00 - Intro
2:42 - Intelligent Life in the Universe
7:30 - Grabby Aliens: A Primer
15:29 - Elites and the End of Global Coordination
18:59 - 6 Hard Steps for the Emergence of Life
22:11 - The Probability of Aliens
33:05 - Domesticating Humans
38:08 - Signaling and the Elephant in the Brain
42:31 - Conscious and Subconscious Behavior
46:53 - Collective Signaling
49:54 - The Contrarian Economics of Medicine and Lifespan
57:00 - Taste
1:01:18 - Hyper-Rationality and Social Cohesion
1:07:03 - How to Predict the Future
1:12:11 - Brain Emulations
1:21:15 - Artificial General Intelligence
1:27:52 - The Descendants of Humans
1:32:49 - Changing Attitudes Toward Life and Death
1:37:33 - The Future of Inequality
1:42:10 - God and The Sacred
1:57:42 - The Most Surprising Thing Robin’s Learned Recently
1:59:57 - What Should More People be Thinking About?
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