John Coogan: Big Tobacco, YC, Theranos, Marxism, Memetics, entrepreneurship and civilization

Intellectual Software

What really makes me pause at this point is not that someone has that unique of a thought process, it's that they've been able to distill it in a really memorable way, like Dawkins memetics. Like the idea of being on your deathbed and having no regrets; that's a very basic concept. I feel like a lot of people throughout history have had that idea, but Jeff Bezos put it into The Regret Minimization Framework and that sticks. -- John Coogan

SHOW NOTES

03:32 - Introduction
04:40 - Big tobacco and the end of cigarettes
07:00 - Society needs Einstein's as well as generalists and those building different knowledge sets
11:10 - From high school rivals to co-founders
14:17 - Fake it till you make it in silicon valley
18:02 - Distilling complex ideas like Jeff Bezos and Paul Graham
21:30 - I had an empty calendar and read books for weeks in YC
24:57 - America should have a very high customer satisfaction rate
30:17 - At what point did Theranos become a fraud?
35:25 - The main Marxist critique is capitalists are well off than workers
40:16 - We don't have enough founders working on multi-decade problems
43:21 - The second-order effects of building tech infrastructure
45:21 - There's lack of fragmentation in the college education market
51:40 - 3 books that will have a huge impact on civilization

-------------------------------------------------------------

You can connect with John here (https://twitter.com/johncoogan)

Check out his Youtube here --> https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnCooganPlus

My DMs are open for conversations (https://twitter.com/AbhishekLpd)

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/intellectual-software/message