Say hi to the new Poke! 🌴 Now officially approved by Apple to text on Apple Messages. As the first and only AI agent. Chat now: Poke.com

My conversation with @EricJorgenson, author of The Book of Elon (@elonmusk). 0:00 Book Reveal 0:39 Build Useful Things 2:19 Engineering Talent Edge 4:26 Wired for War 6:47 Tip of the Spear 8:47 Burn the Boats 13:13 Facing Fear 15:16 Origin Story Myths 18:19 Know Business A to Z 22:17 Simplify and Fail Fast 25:35 Reality and Physics 28:18 The Algorithm Begins 30:34 Delete and Simplify 34:25 Starlink War Room 36:52 Repetition as OS 38:18 Step Three Simplify Optimize 38:43 Question Every Requirement 39:13 Tesla Battery Pack Delete 40:43 Repetition Installs Ideas 42:02 Step Four Accelerate 43:26 Design Org for Speed 46:06 Step Five Automate 46:29 Control and Clean Sheet 48:54 Vertical Integration and Costs 50:47 SpaceX Incentives and Mars 57:11 Frontier Unlocks Starlink 1:00:26 Time as True Currency 1:03:58 Speed Triage and Bottlenecks 1:10:11 Internalized Responsibility 1:12:56 Avoid Serialized Dependencies 1:14:31 Aligning the Team 1:15:07 Time Is the Constraint 1:16:00 One Metric Focus 1:18:03 Directional Predictions 1:19:06 We Must Make Stuff 1:25:39 Manufacturing as Moat 1:26:23 Speed and Direct to Customer 1:28:41 SpaceX Feasibility Study 1:33:07 Edge of Sanity Leadership 1:37:10 Bottlenecks and Integration 1:40:01 Design and Simplify 1:45:15 Catch the Rocket 1:48:14 Capitalism and Closing Includes paid partnerships.

It's not just luxury hotels that are a scam, it's almost everything that's luxury that's a scam Gf bought Rimowa suitcases, expensive and supposed to be better quality than regular ones, but of course they're much worse They keep breaking, like all of them, cracks in the handles, cracks in the sides, it's just cheap plastic shit but it costs $1000 or more Rimowa was bought by LVMH in 2016 which has an average profit margin of 66% and whose strategy is to increase prices by ~5x, decrease costs by ~5x and then create artificial scarcity (limited availability per shop) because people want what they can't get (not me though but many) LVMH is kinda like the luxury version of private equity, it makes everything more expensive and worse and hard to get!

My conversation with @RickRubin 0:00 Less Is More But Harder 2:00 Def Jam From The Dorm Room 4:00 Capturing Club Energy On Record 6:00 Going Deep On Influences 12:30 Why Reduced By Rick Rubin 14:00 Beatles Structure Meets Rap 16:00 The Ruthless Edit 19:30 Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist 22:00 Lazy Workaholic 25:30 Protecting The Moment Of Magic 29:00 Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster 32:30 Professional Listener 44:00 Fishing And Showing Up 47:00 Johnny Cash And Constraints 55:30 Church Business vs. Banking Business 58:50 Run On Intuition Alone 1:01:00 Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process 1:04:30 In Service Of The Artist 1:09:00 Work As Diary Entries 1:13:30 Four Ways Success Destroys You 1:16:00 How To Sustain Success 1:21:00 The House On The Mountain Includes paid partnerships.

This conversation with @RickRubin is special. Here's a 2 minute preview that I’ve watched 15 times. The episode will be out tomorrow:

This guy is aiming to have the world's fastest internet and shares a speed test video...

The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto VI and a $45 Billion Media Empire: Strauss Zelnick Strauss Zelnick has been one of the most powerful people in media for decades, and most people still don't know his name. He took over Take-Two Interactive while the company was under criminal investigation and was 6 months from bankruptcy. It had one product that made money (GTA); everything else was unprofitable. Since then, Take-Two has gone from a $700 million disaster to a $45 billion empire built on Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, and NBA 2K. His management philosophy fits on a napkin: hire the best creative talent on Earth, don't interfere, and run a rational company. He's been doing that for more than 4 decades. This conversation was awesome. 0:00 Hostile Takeover With No Money 1:29 Becoming the New Media Guy 3:58 Lessons From Entertainment History 9:44 Why Hollywood Feared Games 11:52 Fox Turnaround and Barry Diller 20:54 Rupert Murdoch and High Stakes Calm 26:20 Taking the Leap to Crystal Dynamics 38:04 Bootstrapping Without Capital 43:57 Carl Icahn Connection 47:01 Take Two Proxy Coup 56:36 Turnaround Cost Cutting Playbook 1:01:37 Leading Creative Geniuses 1:06:24 Rationality Beats Magic 1:07:54 Borderlands Bet 1:09:28 GTA Timelines Pressure 1:11:22 Specific Goals Visualization 1:21:34 Service Leadership Mindset 1:31:52 Media vs. Entertainment 1:34:22 AI Productivity Reality 1:36:08 Why Hits Surprise Includes paid partnerships.

Is it possible to have an entire company of A players? Adam has 400 employees and a $150 billion market cap. His answer to this question was insightful: “We expect our engineers to be product people so we don't have much of a product org. We expect them to be A players. Now to have a team of A players you've got to be able to recognize A players. I know that Giovanni is an A-plus player. I know that he has no tolerance for anything that's not an A player. He's very quick to go "You've got to be at this level or you're out." Putting people like that in leadership roles allows me to have confidence because they're impatient and they're not going to enable talent that's not qualified in these key roles. You're always turning over people that don't meet your need. You want to be as lean as possible. Now when you have an A player you don't want to cut those people. Those people are super powerful—especially as we go forward. You're going to need lean teams that know how to use AI. Your best people know how to use AI better than your mediocre people and it's not by some sort of linear function. It's much greater than that. Our team is constructed to have leaders who are A players or A-plus players who can see the A players underneath and who have no patience for anything that's not a A player and are very willing to fire on sight if they feel like you're not cutting it. Because we are lean most of our people are very smart. But sometimes being smart is not enough. You've got to be really into building what we want to build. If you're not cut out for it you're going to get really good severance and you go off along your way.”

I had an incredible conversation with Rick Rubin

The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. pmarchive.com/guide_to_caree…

I’m convinced that 𝕏 will be the top platform for podcast distribution/consumption in 2 year’s time. Here’s why… - Virality of content/ strength of algorithm - Inherently social in design - Less banning/ demonetization risk - Emphasis on video - Speed of platform innovation - @elonmusk understands the power of podcasts YouTube and Spotify will fight for the 2 spot. (To keep up, Spotify will need to invest heavily in video, programmatic advertising, and a strong algorithm for suggesting content, but they seem willing to do this.) Apple Podcasts, who at one point had virtually 100% of the space, will be in the 4 spot. Huberman Lab podcast (via @hubermanlab) will soon put more content and more of an emphasis on 𝕏. If you’re a podcaster, I recommend doing the same and investing in growing your audience on 𝕏. And if you don't yet do video, figure that out tomorrow.

John does a deep dive into why every podcast has fake wood panels in the background now — a setup popularized by @hubermanlab — and shares a behind-the-scenes look at TBPN’s soundproofing in the Ultradome: "When you’re recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don’t want reverberation, you don’t want flat walls bouncing sound back, creating echo, distortion, and hollowness." "For a long time, people would put up that egg-crate style." "The problem is, it makes it look like you’re in a sound booth. Not very aesthetic." "So companies said, 'Let’s get the best of both worlds, something aesthetic but still sound-treating.'" "They launched wood slat walls, the spaces between the panels capture sound, act as a little deadening, and you can hide acoustic material behind them." "Andrew Huberman did it, it went mega viral, and everyone copied it." "He wound up painting his black." "Now, if you’re in the black paint industry, that’s where the money is, because everyone with fake wood panels is painting it black."

See you in a few days. Sincerely appreciate all of you who rock with me on this project. performpodcast.com