LABOSSIERE PODCAST

Kevin Hartz is Co-Founder and General Partner at A*, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments. Before establishing A*, Kevin co-founded Eventbrite and guided the company as CEO for its first 11 years before it went public. His entrepreneurial journey also includes co-founding Xoom, a digital money transfer service that PayPal acquired in 2015 for over $1 billion. Kevin has established himself as a successful angel investor with seed investments in companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Ramp, Trulia, and Anduril. His investment portfolio also includes early stakes in prominent companies such as Uber, Palantir, SpaceX, Square, Gusto, and numerous others.00:00 - Intro04:25 - Kevin's North Star06:27 - The Bottleneck to Entrepreneurship09:20 - The Explosion of Capital in Private Technology Markets11:52 - Monopolies and the Shift in Private Enterprise Value Distribution15:18 - Do Public Markets Price Themselves In?16:37 - When Is VC a Suitable Capital Instrument?19:09 - Agglomeration and The Future of Venture Capital20:56 - Cost of Capital and Competing in Venture23:09 - Is Value-Add Real?25:33 - On IPOing27:14 - Picking and Magnitude of Outcomes28:41 - Founders and Investors as Personality Types29:56 - Seed and Growth Investing as Distinct Skillsets32:02 - Incubations33:56 - Symptoms of Excess Capital35:55 - Can You Kingmake With Capital?37:17 - When Does It Make Sense to Raise a Huge Round?38:17 - Capital Efficiency39:39 - The Expansion of Technology Markets41:51 - Capital Innovation in Venture43:47 - The Endgame of Evaluation44:33 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, a programming environment for everyone that allows anyone to write and deploy code, regardless of experience. Replit has 34 million users globally and is one of the fastest-growing developer communities in the world.Before Replit, Amjad was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team (which he helped start) at Facebook, where he contributed to popular open-source developer tools. Additionally, he played a key role as a founding engineer at the online coding school Codecademy.0:00 - Intro4:31 - Utopia, Dystopia, and Life in a Post-AI World11:28 - Replit and Expressiveness in Computing17:01 - Balancing Accessibility and Control in Products19:53 - Is AI a Sustaining or Disruptive Technology?25:04 - Building With AI and the Future of Company Structure29:32 - The Shape and Defensibility of Software in a World of AI33:37 - The Nation State and Stagnation in the Physical World38:28 - Technology and Resilience41:54 - What Shouldn't Get Automated?43:54 - What Becomes Valuable in a Post-AI World?47:10 - AI Augmenting vs Competing with Humans51:51 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm's American Dynamism practice, which invests in companies supporting the national interest across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and critical infrastructure. She sits on the boards of Apex Space and Hadrian Automation and is a board observer for Saronic Technologies and Castelion.She was previously a partner at General Catalyst, where she co-led the firm's seed practice and invested in the inception rounds of defense technology companies including Anduril Industries and Vannevar Labs. Prior to General Catalyst, she was a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. Katherine holds a BA in Government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford and a Masters of Public Advocacy from the National University of Ireland, Galway.Katherine believes that free speech is essential to promoting American Dynamism. She is a proud champion of new media companies and academic centers that promote free speech and free thought. She serves on the boards of The Free Press and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.0:00 - Intro4:48 - The Decline in Public Service7:47 - Making Government Cool Again10:07 - Silicon Valley's Aversion to National Security13:15 - Positive Sum vs Zero Sum Cultures16:27 - China, Authoritarianism, and Doing Hard Things19:27 - What Makes America Special?23:03 - Silicon Valley and the “Real Economy”26:28 - Investing in Mature Markets29:08 - Vanna White and The Wheel of Fortune30:27 - Journalism and Loneliness32:52 - Time and Suffering38:10 - Seriousness and Purpose41:11 - Is Culture Downstream of Technology?42:48 - Propaganda and Coolness as a Strategic Asset44:40 - Florida, Texas, and Regulatory Arbitrage47:51 - DC, Silicon Valley, and Florida50:20 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Keith Rabois is a Managing Partner at Khosla Ventures and the CEO of OpenStore, which acquires small direct-to-consumer businesses. Keith co-founded Opendoor and led the first institutional investments in DoorDash and Affirm. He has early stakes in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish, and also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. He's regarded as one of the greatest early stage investors.Keith began his career in the industry as a senior executive at PayPal and subsequently served in influential roles at LinkedIn and as chief operating officer of Square. As a board member, Keith guided Yelp and Xoom from inception to IPO, and served on the board of Reddit from 2012-2018.0:00 - Intro1:56 - Great Founders and the Bottleneck to Innovation4:35 - Vertical Integration6:24 - The Hollywood Model of Startups7:41 - The “Why Now?” in Company-Building9:50 - Multi-Product Companies10:58 - Iteration and Pivots12:52 - Picking Co-Founders14:51 - Identifying Mispriced Talent17:20 - Attracting Talent20:57 - Assessing Talent24:02 - Doing References25:56 - Closing Hires28:28 - Thinking 6 Months Ahead31:36 - How Long Should You Interview For?33:28 - Creating a Monopoly on Talent35:44 - Raising Capital37:40 - Screening Investors41:21 - Building a Board44:11 - Triaging and Identifying Problems47:59 - Writing vs Editing and Consistent Voice49:34 - Creating Transparency50:50 - Barrels and Ammunition54:55 - Task-Relevant Maturity56:40 - On Delegating59:21 - Measuring Inputs vs Outputs1:02:58 - Underrated Metrics1:05:22 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur, executive, and one of the greatest tech investors of all time, with early stakes in something like 40 billion-plus dollar companies: AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Flexport, Instacart, Notion, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe… I could really go on. He's now managing a new billion dollar venture fund, for which he's the sole investor. Elad is also the co-founder of 2 companies: Color Genomics, a company providing genetic testing, software and clinical services for large-scale health programs – and before that, Mixer Labs, a company building location infrastructure for mobile devices that was acquired by Twitter. He worked as a VP at Twitter and also started the mobile team at Google. 0:00 - Intro 6:11 - Blank Slates and Decaying Institutions 8:16 - Western Pessimism and Agendas of Abundance vs Scarcity 12:30 - The Long Boom: Is Innovation Speeding Up? 16:26 - Are Startups Founder Limited or Market Limited? 19:26 - EIR Syndrome and Choosing the Right Market 21:41 - What Makes for a Good Investor, Operator and Entrepreneur? 24:05 - Positives and Negatives of Investing and Operating 26:17 - The Brand Value of Individuals vs Institutions 28:05 - Competing with Massive Firms 30:33 - Market-Driven Investing 33:23 - Starting Companies as Surfing Waves 36:09 - Age of Accomplishment and The Deferral of Adulthood 42:15 - What to Say Yes To 44:21 - Defense Tech and Complacency 49:25 - Private Markets and The Future of Venture 52:11 - Discontinuities in AI 53:49 - On Google 55:16 - LLM Oligopoly and Long-Term Scenarios for AI 1:00:41 - AGI and Sleeping 3 Hours a Night 1:03:19 - AI Doomerism 1:06:05 - The Deterioration of Speed 1:09:27 - Bureaucracy and the State of Nuclear 1:12:52 - Generosity and the Culture of Silicon Valley 1:15:19 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Chris Mason is a professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also one of the founding Directors of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, and the co-author of The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk. 0:00 - Intro 2:29 - How Long Will Humanity Last? 9:01 - On Societal Pessimism and Long-Term Thinking 13:02 - Aliens! 17:36 - The NASA Twins Study 23:17 - Nature vs Nurture 25:56 - Chris' Dream Experiments 27:45 - Genomics: Ethics, Opportunities, and the Future 37:38 - Space Race 2.0: Colonization, Regulation and Planetary Liberty 40:36 - Colonizing Mars and Achieving Planetary Liberty 45:46 - The Extreme Microbiome Project 47:14 - The Earth Similarity Index, Generation Ships and Leaving the Solar System 53:10 - Why Do Any of This in The First Place? 56:19 - The Age of Prediction 1:01:19 - On Chris, Science, Academia, and Big Questions 1:08:47 - Synthetic Biology, Cyborgs and the Future of Human Life 1:10:10 - Chris' Biggest Goal 1:11:06 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund and the CEO of OpenStore, which acquires small direct-to-consumer businesses. Keith co-founded Opendoor and led the first institutional investments in DoorDash and Affirm. He has early stakes in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish, and also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. He's regarded as one of the greatest early stage investors. Keith began his career in the industry as a senior executive at PayPal and subsequently served in influential roles at LinkedIn and as chief operating officer of Square. As a board member, Keith guided Yelp and Xoom from inception to IPO, and served on the board of Reddit from 2012-2018. 0:00 - Intro 2:35 - Bomb-Building and the PayPal Mafia 5:10 - Spotting Talent 11:32 - Where Keith is 1000:1 16:14 - PayPal, Regulation, and Law 22:00 - Regulatory Arbitrage 25:03 - AI 27:46 - Keith's 5 Bosses 31:04 - How to Operate 34:16 - OpenStore 39:33 - Founding vs Investing 42:48 - Requests for Startups 47:39 - Early-Stage Investing 53:46 - Companies as Cults 56:42 - The Future of Venture 1:00:56 - Not Stretching, Engineering Serendipity, and How to Ask Better Questions 1:06:40 - On Keith 1:08:45 - Time Allocation, Self-Grading, Values, Reading and Legacy 1:16:11 - What Should More People be Thinking About?

Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist and writer. He is the CEO and co-founder of Tusk Ventures, the world's first venture capital fund that invests solely in early stage startups in highly regulated industries, and the founder of political consulting firm Tusk Strategies. Bradley's family foundation is funding and leading the national campaign to bring mobile voting to all U.S. elections. Tusk Philanthropies also runs and funds anti-hunger campaigns that have led to the creation of anti-hunger policies and programs (including universal school breakfast programs) in 22 different states, helping to feed over 12.5 million people. Bradley is the author of The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups From Death by Politics and Obvious in Hindsight (coming out this November), writes a column for Fast Company, hosts a podcast called Firewall about the intersection of tech and politics, and is the co-founder of the Gotham Book Prize. He recently opened a bookstore, podcast studio, event space and cafe called P&T Knitwear on Manhattan's lower east side. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. 0:00 - Intro 2:03 - The Incentives of Politics 10:57 - Bradley's Philosophy 18:33 - More Political Parties and Fixing Political Polarization 25:13 - Big Tech Antitrust 29:09 - What Bradley Would Change 32:23 - The Decline of Trust in Institutions  36:12 - Tusk Ventures 37:53 - Requests for Startups 39:50 - Debt, Inflation, and COVID 46:31 - The Story of Uber  49:29 - How Uber Beats Lyft 52:59 - Weaponizing a Constituency  54:53 - Regulated Industries Bradley's Excited About  57:54 - Crypto 1:01:40 - Psychedelics and Doing Ketamine  1:07:21 - What Keeps Bradley Up at Night? 1:10:48 - Mobile Voting  1:15:41 - Doing Lots of Things at Once 1:18:25 - Why Credentials Are Overrated 1:23:42 - On Happiness 1:28:31 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Jeff Morris Jr is the Managing Partner at Chapter One, an early stage venture capital fund. He's formerly the VP of Product and Revenue at Tinder, which he helped scale to become the #1 grossing app in the world. 0:00 - Intro 1:57 - Growing up in Silicon Valley 5:01 - Writing, Hollywood, and Tech 13:15 - AI and the Future of Content 21:20 - Dating Apps Today and Time at Tinder 29:26 - Future of Product and Strategy 36:30 - Crypto 40:38 - On Venture Capital 53:19 - Building Chapter One 59:36 - Goals, Mentors, and Personal Philosophy 1:07:56 - $10,000 for Michael Jordan's Cigar and Other Fun Stories 1:16:52 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Sari Azout is a seed stage investor, design-thinker, product strategist, and storyteller. She spends her days investing and building consumer technology companies for the sake of people, not for the sake of technology.Currently, she invests in early-stage startups at Level Ventures  and is building Startupy, a company building tools to help humans collectively curate the best knowledge on the Internet.Her life's work is committed to investing and helping founders build empathetic technology products that make human life better.  In her spare time, she writes about humanizing tech, building the future, personal growth, and raising children. She was born and raised in Colombia, educated in Rhode Island, trained in NYC, and is developing her life's work in Miami.Startupy: https://startupy.world/

Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes and speak about the history and philosophy of progress, especially in technology and industry.He's also the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online learning program about the history of technology for high schoolers, and a part-time technical consultant and adviser to Our World in Data.Formerly, he was a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. He was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database.He's also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon and Groupon, and was at a few other startups as co-founder or early employee. Long ago he helped build a biotech supercomputer for D. E. Shaw Research. The Roots of Progress: https://rootsofprogress.org/Jason's Personal Site: https://jasoncrawford.org/Find Jason on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford

Samo Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that investigates the political and institutional landscape of society. He's also a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation where he studies how institutions can endure for centuries and millennia.Samo is also Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute, where he advises how institutions can shape the future of technology.He writes and speaks on history, institutions, and strategy with a focus on exceptional leaders that create new social and political forms. He's systematized this approach as “Great Founder Theory.”

John List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wyoming. He joined the UChicago faculty in 2005, and served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012-2018. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was a professor at several universities, and has more prizes for his work than I can count. In addition to his academic career, List served as the chief economist for Uber, Lyft and now WalMart. Previously, he served in the White House on the Council of Economic Advisers from 2002-2003. His research focuses on questions in microeconomics, with a particular emphasis on using field experiments to address issues related to the inner-workings of markets, the effects of various incentives schemes on market equilibria and allocations, how behavioral economics can augment the standard economic model, on early childhood education and interventions, and more recently on the gender earnings gap in the gig economy, using evidence from rideshare drivers.His research includes over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published books, including the 2013 international best-seller, The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, and his new book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. You can get a copy where you get your books.

Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, where she studies abuse in information technologies, investigating the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in user behavior, factional crowd dynamics, and the ways in which actors leverage these systems to exert influence. Renee led multiple investigations and presented public testimony on multi-year efforts and influence operations of Russian actors in the 2016 presidential election. She's gone on to advise Congress, the state Department, and other academic, civil society, and business organizations on terrorist activity and state-sponsored information warfare. Renée also speaks and writes regularly about technology policy as a contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her work has been featured or covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Yale Review, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist and the Journal of Commerce. She also appeared in the documentary The Social Dilemma. Before all this she ran research, marketing and business development at a couple startups, and before still worked in venture capital and quant finance.Renée is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O'Reilly Media. She also has degrees in Computer Science and Political Science from the Honors College at Stony Brook University. In her free time, she's the co-founder of the parent advocacy organization Vaccinate California and raises 3 children.

Kyle Samani is Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital, a thesis-driven crypto investment firm that he co-founded with Tushar Jain. Multicoin was founded in 2017, and manages several billion in assets under hedge funds and venture funds.Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of Pristine, a company building Google Glass software for surgeons.Under Kyle's management, Multicoin has made some notable investments including Solana, Near, Helium, Audius, and Arweave, making Multicoin one of the most successful crypto funds around. Kyle's writing and successful contrarian bets have made him one of the most respected thought leaders in the crypto space. 

Matt Galligan is a serial entrepreneur, passionate about building world-class products with great design and user experience. He's currently Co-Founder and CEO at XMTP Labs, a company building an open, crypto-native communication protocol that connects communities, applications, and users.Matt previously co-founded four companies: Interchange, Circa, SimpleGeo, and Socialthing. He also mentors and advises a number of startups that have come out of the TechStars program.

Anthony Pompliano, or Pomp, as you might know him, is an American veteran, entrepreneur and technology investor. He's built and sold numerous companies, ran product and growth teams at Facebook and Snapchat, and  currently manages a portfolio worth over $500 million focusing on early-stage tech. He's more recently the host of the Best Business Show, and The Pomp Podcast, one of the most popular podcasts in business and investing that's been downloaded over 20M times, and writes a daily newsletter that goes out to over 210,000 people. 

Adam Jackson is the Co-Founder of the Braintrust network, a decentralized global talent network that connects freelance knowledge workers with clients. Adam has founded 4 VC-backed companies and an asset management company over the last 16 years and is an angel investor in over 100 companies. 

Nadia Eghbal is trying to understand how people work. She's a writer and researcher interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet. Her latest book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, is about open source developers and what they tell us about the evolution of our online social spaces.Nadia interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, and argues that open source code is a form of public infrastructure. It requires maintenance, and that offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators on all platforms.She's now deep in research mode, exploring a new topic about philanthropy and the 2010s tech wealth boom.She spent the last few years trying to understand parasocial communities and reputation-based economies, which she first explored as an independent researcher at Protocol Labs. Those ideas were put into practice when she joined Substack, where she worked until recently.

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, one of the largest and most renowned advertising agencies in the world. Rory started the behavioral insights team and spends his days applying behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology to solve problems that traditional advertising agencies haven't been able to.He's the author of Alchemy,  The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity, and more recently co-author of Transport for Humans, a book about adapting transport to more human wants and needs, using behavioural science as a tool for design.

Roneil Rumburg is the Co-founder & CEO of Audius, a music streaming platform and fully decentralized community of artists, developers, and listeners collaborating to share and defend music.Prior to Audius, Roneil co-founded Kleiner Perkins' early-stage seed fund, KPCB Edge. At Kleiner Perkins, Roneil was responsible for seed investments into Blockchain and AI companies, including Lightning Labs. Before that, he co-founded a Bitcoin peer-to-peer payment company called Backslash. Roneil attended Stanford University where he received a BA in computer science.

Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World's 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies.As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is co-founder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Cellularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company.Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of three books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think, BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World and The Future is Faster Than You Think.Diamandis is described by many as “the best and most dynamic speaker in the industry.” Diamandis' mission through his keynotes and speaking engagements is to help his audiences understand the pace and implications of exponential technology, and how to drive innovation within their organization.

Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from UChicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.She was born in Budapest, Hungary, and attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. Her book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) discusses the major value-transformations that shape our lives: becoming parents, changes in political views, acquiring new passions. How do these changes happen, and to what extent does a person have a hand in guiding them?

Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of World After Capital. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us, through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. 

Vijay Boyapati was born and raised in Australia and moved to the United States to do a PhD in Computer Science. He never started the PhD, but took a job offer instead and ended up at a small startup called Google. After leaving the much bigger Google, in 2007, Vijay spent a year campaigning in the 2008 Presidential election, helping to raise millions of dollars for Ron Paul.After becoming disillusioned by the political process, Vijay decided to continue to seek change through technology. Discovering Bitcoin in 2011, Vijay quickly went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. With a background in Austrian economics he spent years thinking about the economic framework within which Bitcoin's value proposition could be understood. His thinking on the economics of Bitcoin culminated in an article, and now book called the Bullish Case for Bitcoin which is one of the most read articles on Bitcoin after  Satoshi Nakamoto's Whitepaper and it has been translated into 20 different languages. The article is often cited as the most useful resource to give to newcomers who are attempting to understand Bitcoin.

Sam Corcos is a Co-founder at Levels, a company on a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. Most recently he was the Co-founder and Head of Technology at CarDash, a company making automotive repair and maintenance convenient and transparent. He previously started Sightline Maps with Ben Judge, where he worked with Special Operations Command to develop mapping technology under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. He's also written a book on building distributed, concurrent web services using React and Phoenix called Learn Phoenix. As if that wasn't enough, he worked at the oncology center at UC Davis for two summers, co authoring a paper during his time there which has too many words I can't pronounce in it, so I'll leave you to read more at corcos.io.

Gaby Goldberg is an early-stage web3 investor at TCG crypto, working on the firm's investments at the intersection of consumer and crypto, not even a year out of college. She thinks and writes about the different ways we interact with technology and about ideas surrounding consumer technology and digital culture. You can follow her writing on mirror and twitter.

Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.A dedicated writer and communicator of economic ideas, Cowen is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media. Cowen's latest book is Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Antihero, with an upcoming book called Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World which he wrote with Daniel Gross.Cowen is host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Cowen as “America's Hottest Economist” after his e-book, The Great Stagnation, appeared twice on the New York Times e-book bestseller list. Cowen's blog was named in the Top Financial Blogs of 2011 by TIME and in the Best Economics Blogs of 2010 by The Wall Street Journal.Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University. 

Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago's Pearson Institute and Harris Public Policy. He is an economist and political scientist who studies poverty, violence and crime in developing countries. He has designed and evaluated strategies for tackling poverty, including cash transfers to the poorest. Much of his work is with the victims and perpetrators of crime and violence, testing the link between poverty and violence. His recent work looks at other sources of and solutions to violence. These solutions range from behavioral therapy to social norm change and local-level state building. He has worked mainly in Colombia, Liberia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Chicago's South Side. Dr. Blattman was previously faculty at Columbia and Yale Universities, and holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and a Master's in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Born in Jerusalem, Daniel came to America when he was accepted into the Y Combinator program at 17, the youngest ever to be admitted. He co-founded social media search engine Cue and sold it to Apple where he led their machine learning department until joining Y Combinator as a partner in 2017.In 2018 he created Pioneer, a company that searches out bright people with talent and ambition, but lack the opportunity to get their ideas into the world.

Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar (2016), Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), published as The Diet Delusion in the UK. Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. Taubes graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in applied physics, and received a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and in journalism from Columbia. 

Blake Robbins is a partner at Ludlow Ventures based out of Detroit, Michigan. He started at Ludlow as an associate shortly after graduating college, having worked for the likes of SpaceX, Nest and Google, and was promoted to partner within two and a half years. Blake's obsession with the future of media has enabled him to become a thought leader in the industry. He's sourced investments in firms like 100 Thieves and others.

​​Jude Gomila is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the Founder & CEO of Golden. Golden is on a mission to map out human knowledge and is backed by a16z, Founders Fund, Giga Fund, and others. Prior to Golden, Jude co-founded and spent several year working on Heyzap, a mobile advertising platform which was acquired by Fyber in 2016. Since making his first angel investment in 2010, Jude has made over 250 early stage investments including Carta, Gusto, Airtable, Boom, Superhuman, Mercury, Calm, Relativity Space, Ironclad, Astra, Benchling, Ginkgo Bioworks, Linear and many more. 

Jake is a pseudonymous blogger and podcaster who has published under the name ‘Blog of Jake' since he left his job in investment banking. He also has a podcast called Pod of Jake, where he's interviewed dozens of outstanding figures moving the world forward. He's incredibly unique in that he's managed to build a brand anonymously in a world where being online seems to come at the cost of privacy. 

Eric Jorgenson is a man of many projects. He's a startup growth guy, writer, and (rarely) an angel investor. He is on the founding team of Zaarly and has been publishing online since 2014. He builds books, products, and courses and writes about wealth, startups, and leverage. He most recently wrote the best seller "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”. Naval is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList, as well as a prolific angel investor. The book collects and curates Naval's wisdom from Twitter, Podcasts, and Essays over the past decade. Eric is also something of a sandwich connoisseur. Eric's website: https://www.ejorgenson.com/Eric's course: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

Delian Asparouhov is a principal at Founders Fund. Before joining Founders Fund, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures, head of growth at Teespring, and founder of a healthcare company called Nightingale. He's now co-founder at Varda, a space manufacturing company, which we'll get into later. Delian is Bulgarian, attended MIT, and likes to ski and play soccer.

Amjad Masad is the CEO and founder of Replit, an online programming environment that makes coding more fun and approachable. On Replit you can build and host apps without leaving the IDE. Think of it as google docs for coding.Before that he was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team, which he helped start, at Facebook. Before still, he was the first employee at Codecademy. He did some tech-leading, and built product and infrastructure. Earlier, he was briefly at Yahoo. And before that I was going to college and on the side I worked in cybersecurity.He's into powerlifting and grilling steaks. He also likes to read and is mostly interested in philosophy and Artificial General Intelligence. He's of the opinion that good Hollywood movies are on the decline.

Peter McCormack is an independent content creator and “some say journalist,” in his own words. He's the creator of What Bitcoin Did and Defiance TV, both of which he hosts podcasts for, covering topics such as Freedom, Human Rights, Censorship and Bitcoin.

Rolf Potts has reported from more than sixty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, Slate.com, Outside, the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, Sports Illustrated, NPR, and the Travel Channel. His adventures have taken him across six continents, and include piloting a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, traversing Israel on foot, bicycling across Burma, driving a Land Rover across South America, and traveling around the world for six weeks with no luggage or bags of any kind. Potts is perhaps best known for promoting the ethic of independent travel, and his book on the subject, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel has been through thirty-two printings and translated into several foreign languages. His collection of literary travel essays, Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer, won a 2009 Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers, and became the first American-authored book to win Italy's prestigious Chatwin Prize for travel writing. His newest book, Souvenir, was published by Bloomsbury in March of 2018. Rolf's stories have appeared in numerous literary anthologies over the years, and more than twenty of his essays have been selected as “Notable Mention” in The Best American Essays, The Best American Non-Required Reading, and The Best American Travel Writing. His writing for National Geographic Traveler, Slate.com, Lonely Planet, Outside and Travelers' Tales garnered him five Lowell Thomas Awards. He has lectured at venues around the world, including New York University, the University of Lugano, the University of Melbourne, Authors@Google, and the World Affairs Council. He has taught semester-long nonfiction writing courses at Penn and Yale. Though he rarely stays in one place for long, Potts has, over the years, felt somewhat at home in places like Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, New Orleans, New York, and Paris, where he runs a series of creative writing classes each summer. He is based in north-central Kansas, where he keeps a small farmhouse on 30 acres with his wife, Kansas-born actress Kristen Bush.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and author based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the aging process. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA in computer science and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a Phd in social science from Cal Tech, master's degrees in physics and philosophy, and nine years of experience as a research programmer in artificial intelligence and Bayesian statistics. He's recognized for his contributions to economics and prediction markets and in many other fields. He is the author of The Age of Em and Co-author of The Elephant in the Brain. 

Eli Dourado is an economist and regulatory hacker living in Washington, DC, and a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. Before joining CGO, he spent 2+ years as head of global policy at Boom, a company creating a supersonic airliner. Before that, he was a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program. He has a PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Beth Comstock's first book, Imagine it Forward, was published in September 2018. She is a director at Nike, trustee of The National Geographic Society and former board president of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in biology.Until December 2017, she spent nearly three decades at GE. As Chief Marketing Officer and then Vice Chair of Innovation, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, develop digital and clean-energy futures, seed new businesses and enhance brand value.As President of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, she oversaw TV ad revenue and digital media efforts, including the early development of hulu.com. Prior to this, she held a succession of roles at NBC, CBS and CNN/Turner Broadcasting. 

Annie Duke is an author, corporate speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space. Annie's latest book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, is available now from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, Annie won more than $4 million in tournament poker before retiring from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.Annie is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. She is also a member of the National Board of After-School All-Stars and the Board of Directors of the Franklin Institute. In 2020, she joined the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Patri Friedman is a former Google engineer and founder of the Seasteading Institute, a small non-profit whose mission is "To establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems, which he created with help from Peter Thiel. He started Ephemerisle, the largest self-organizing festival on water. Patri is on the board of the Startup Societies Foundation, ran the angel fund Zarco Investment Group, and advises a variety of new governance projects.Patri has a BS in Math from Harvey Mudd College, an MS in CS from Stanford University, and an MBA from Cardean University. He used to play poker competitively and wrote one of the first online poker bots. He's a self-described anarcho-capitalist, transhumanist and rationalist. He is also a prolific writer on philosophy, politics, and economics on Twitter and the blog Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Patri comes from a line of great revolutionary thinkers, his grandfather Milton Friedman was the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, and his father David Friedman is a well-known political theorist and legal scholar. Today we talked about Poker, seasteading, and anarcho capitalism.