CoFounder Weekly is a newsletter about startup life, etc.
This past week, my wife Dana and I took a road trip from smoky SF to even smokier Portland (this trip was planned pre-fire), so we then drove back to SF, and then thought “f&ck it, let’s go back to NY for a week to escape the smoke and see some fam”.
24 hours of travel time = buncha podcasts.
This week’s newsletter is a sampler of what we listened to….
Willits, CA
Gold Beach, OR
🦠 Nassim Taleb on the Pandemic
EconTalk: Interview w/ Nasim Taleb (67 min)
Fun Fact: According to Taleb, you don’t need to total lockdown to manage a pandemic. You need to stop (1) super spreader events — i.e. subways, elevators, big events and (2) wear masks.
Fun Fact #2: Quarantines used to be 40 days during previous plagues. The word literally means “40 days” in its Venetian origin.
🎧🎧 Listen here 🎧🎧
🇺🇸 1619: How Slavery has transformed America
Hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones (4 hours)
Not so Fun Fact: To fund the expansion of cotton production, US banks made loans to plantation owners who took out mortgages on their slaves. In other words, plantation owners mortgaged enslaved workers to buy more enslaved workers. Banks would then create slave-backed mortgaged bonds, by bundling the debt, and selling the securitized bonds across the world. At the height of slavery, the value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the US. Then the cotton market plummeted due to overproduction, and the US govt forgave the debt of banks who offered the loans. Banks were too big to fail.
🎧🎧 Listen here 🎧🎧
💡 History of Innovation
Naval Ravikant interviews Matt Ridley (60 min)
One of the big ideas (there are many): “Most of the time innovation is an incremental process. It looks disruptive when you’re looking backwards. But at the time it’s surprisingly gradual. The first version of a new technology looks surprisingly like the last version of an old technology.”
🎧🎧 Listen here 🎧🎧
👽 Doing the No No
Interview w/ Britt Wray and Adam Zaretsky (72 minutes)
High level: Adam Zaretsky is a bioartist who manipulates DNA (think CRISPR) as art.
🎧🎧 Listen here 🎧🎧
🍄 Investing in psychedelic companies
Interview w/ Ryan Zurrer (57 min)
Fun fact: Ryan is one of the first psychedelic VCs.
🎧🎧 Listen here 🎧🎧
Nice to be back in NY for a bit,
P.S. Send me your fav podcast you’ve listened to recently.
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