David Kim (💚💚💚💚💚 🥃) and I look back at the past year, both for Scuttleblurb and for the world of finance & markets. We use David’s excellent ‘2025 business update’ as a foundation for our chat, and I encourage you to read it.

We cover a lot of ground. David’s unusually candid look at the business of running a paid newsletter (subscriber churn, the tension between writing what interests you and writing what gets clicks, and why he almost renamed his blog “Fallen Angels”), the tactical changes he made to turn things around (frequency, the Scuttlebits format, a price increase that went better than expected), and his partnership with our common friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸) on the Never Sell podcast (🎧).

On the markets and investing side, we dig into:

* The weird vibe of 2025: indices hiding a lot of pain underneath, with good companies down 40-50% while the index barely fell.

* Why investors seem blind to cyclicality in ways they weren’t 20 years ago (Trex at 65x peak earnings vs. home builders at single-digit multiples in ‘05-’06).

* The beaten-down compounder opportunity, and how fast some of those names recovered.

* The AI pain trade rotating into SaaS and data providers (Gartner, FactSet, S&P, Thomson Reuters), and why the bear case on Gartner may be missing something important.

* David’s forensic breakdown of how Shift Four calculates organic growth, including cross-selling synergies from acquisitions in ways most acquirers don’t, and why the sell-side comparisons to payment peers aren’t apples-to-apples.

* Booz Allen and the frenemy dynamics with Palantir/Anduril. The write-up almost nobody read but David is most proud of.

* How competitive boundaries between industries are getting blurrier, including for Big Tech, and what that means for moat analysis

* David’s nuanced take on using AI tools for research, where it levels you up vs. where the “knowledge illusion” kicks in and de-skilling becomes a real risk.

We also talk about what’s next in his research pipeline (Veeve, U-Haul, Lamb Weston, S&P, Moody’s, Thomson Reuters, etc), and whether Pluribus can stick the landing in season two.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed talking to David! 💚 🥃

My friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸) and I sat down to do something that sounds simple but turned out to be a seminar. In 2018, Apple  became the first $1T company. Fast forward to now, and we’re living in the era of the Trillion Dollar Club, a small group of companies that collectively represent an almost comical amount of market cap (Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, TSMC, Meta, Broadcom, and Tesla).

We went through all of them one by one and shared our honest thoughts, bouncing between the big picture and small details that may turn out to be crucial.

If the market is a card game, we wanted to figure out which hands we like best. ♥️♦️♣️♠️

We touched on many interesting ideas that help better understand the forces at play for Big Tech these days. Early on, we dive into the “compute theory of everything.” MBI found this 1998 Hans Moravec paper with a sentence so good he repeats it to himself like a mantra on his daily walks! 🚶‍♂️(gotta get those 10k steps! 👣)

Among many other things, we discuss:

* Jensen’s “circular financing” strategy, and why it might actually be brilliant 🔄

* East Coast vs. West Coast investing philosophy.

* Why the job of the analyst is getting harder, not easier.

* How academic papers create trillions in value (cat paper, “Attention is All You Need,” Chinchilla).

* Apple as “Switzerland,” and their risky bet that we’re at the hardware end-state 📱

* Whether Google has the best hand but keeps getting in its own way, and DeepMind as Google's "reverse takeover" and saving grace

* Why Microsoft seemed to have everything and somehow ended up in the doghouse 💾

* TSMC as the true choke point, the bottom of the inverted pyramid, and why MBI is Zen about geopolitical risk 🧘‍♂️

* Meta’s confusing inability to reach the frontier despite checking every box, and what are the necessary ingredients for a frontier AI lab? 🧑‍🍳🍜

* Tesla as the ultimate “West Coast philosophy” stock and Musk’s loss of interest in EVs.

* Broadcom’s IP blocks + custom ASIC enablement + networking… with the risk of hyperscaler disintermediation.

* Amazon's retail business being underestimated and Walmart as a sneakily smart company 🛒

* A tribute to Buffett and Munger, where our emotions come out a bit.

* Which CEOs are overrated and underrated? 👍👎

We close with the hardest question: if you could own only one of these companies for the next 20 years, which would it be? We both landed on the same answer. Listen to the end to find out why 🎧

Make sure to check out MBI Deep Dives, now with daily updates!

Me too! *high five* 🙏

Today, I’m talking with my friends Tinkered Thinking and Dylan O’Sullivan about ‘White Mirror’, a book written by the former, edited by the latter, and published by OSV’s Infinite Books (full disclosure: I was involved in the publication of this book, but we wanted to publish it because it’s great, we don’t think it’s great because we published it. The order matters!).

It’s a wide-ranging conversation aimed at those who HAVEN’T yet read the book, so don’t worry. We go down all kinds of rabbit holes 🐇 and tangents, including:

* From a tweet to 31 stories, the wild origin of White Mirror

* The intersection of technology & human experience

* Reclaiming childlike imagination and a sense of wonder as an antidote to pessimism

* Simulation theory, meditation, and the nature of reality

* Literary architecture and chiastic structures

* Predictions in the book that are coming true, and startup ideas hidden in the stories

* The craft of writing fiction vs. non-fiction

* Status games, adulthood, and missing rituals and rites of passage

* Writing science fiction as someone who doesn’t read much scifi

* …and much more

🏆 Giveaway: 5 Signed Copies of White Mirror! 🪞📚✍️

Thanks to Tinkered’s generosity, I’m giving away five signed copies of White Mirror. If you want to participate, the instructions are simple:

* If you’re a paid supporter and are interested, send me an email to let me know you’d like one (you can just reply to any of the newsletter emails or this podcast email). Send this before December 1, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST. That’s it.

* On December 3, 2025, I’ll draw names out of a hat, or buy one of those bingo machines with the balls bouncing around, or use randomizing software, whatever, and pick 5 winners. When you win, I’ll email you to ask for shipping details.

* If you’re NOT yet a paid supporter, but would like to become one before December 1, no problem, you can participate. Hit the subscribe button, and then drop me an email that mentions you’re interested in the signed book (I’ll also send you a link to the private Discord and to Zoom Q&As I do with supporters).

There aren’t that many of you, and not all will enter, so if you do put your name in the hat 🎟️ 🎩 your odds of getting a signed book are very good.

But you don’t have to wait for that to buy it. And if you win, just keep the signed copy and give the regular one to someone else. 🎁

🛒 Best Place to Buy the Book 👇

You can buy White Mirror on Amazon, but the real pro move is to get it from Infinite Books because, for the same price, you get the deluxe paperback of the book + the audiobook + the ebook (DRM-free).

The book is a beautiful artifact, we spent a ton of time obsessing over the details. 🔍

His investment research journal/company deep dives/business explorations were a key inspiration for this 🚢 steamboat. While the format is different, I hope there are similarities in the spirit. And I know that he has influenced and inspired many others — especially the good ones!

In our conversation this year — the fifth one! — we explore the State of Scuttleblurb 📊, his analyses of key industries and companies from the past year 🏭, and our perspective on the market looking back at 2024 and heading into 2025 🔮. We also discuss the evolution of his research process and the new tools he's adopted 🛠️.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed having the conversation!

Photo: David and his brother Rich.

If you missed them, here are the previous four annual interviews I did with David:

* 📄 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2020)

* 📄 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2022)

* 🎧 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2023)

* 📄 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2024)

(If you missed it, here’s part 1)

Another wide-ranging conversation: We discuss the implications of the new U.S. administration on energy policy, particularly focusing on Chris Wright, the incoming Secretary of Energy.

We explore Wright’s background in the oil and gas industry, his connections to the nuclear sector through his board position at Oklo, and what his appointment might mean for both conventional and advanced nuclear power in America.

We also get into the dynamics between different energy sources, including the relationship between nuclear power and electric vehicles, the future of LNG exports, and the complex economics of oil and gas production.

Don’t miss the under-discussed love story (💞) between nuclear and batteries. ☢️🔋

We also touch on recent regulatory challenges facing Big Tech companies’ nuclear power initiatives and how the energy landscape might evolve in the coming years.

We close with why it’s time to build (again). 🏗️ ⚛️ 🚧👷‍♂️🛠️

What happens when six film enthusiasts dissect Christopher Nolan's most ambitious and polarizing puzzle box? 🧩

We dive deep into TENET — exploring and deconstructing the film's twisted timeline, inverted action sequences, and reality-bending concepts. 🕰️ 🧠🌀

What worked? What didn’t? Do we love it, hate it, or love/hate it?

Our distinguished panel of inverted time-travelers assembled to discuss this crazy film is composed of:

* 🗣️ Jim O’Shaughnessy

* 🗣️ Jack Connor

* 🗣️ Tinkered Thinking

* 🗣️ Ed William

* 🗣️ Dylan O’Sullivan

Along the way, we venture into Nolan's other films and rank our faovrites, and somehow end up in Deadwood territory 🤠

We discussed how AI's massive power needs are reshaping energy policy in unexpected ways.

For years, Big Tech claimed to run on '100% renewable energy' while quietly relying on nuclear and fossil fuels. But now, as companies race to build massive AI computing centers requiring gigawatts of reliable 24/7 power, that pretense is crumbling. Starting with Microsoft's Three Mile Island deal for the revival of a shutdown nuclear plant, we explore how Silicon Valley's desperate hunt for steady power is forcing an energy policy reset across the industry and how that may impact anti-nuclear NGOs and policymakers everywhere.

We dive into Germany's nuclear situation, Taiwan's power challenges, and how the world's richest companies went from being part of the problem to potentially part of the solution.

I hope you enjoy it and will ➡️ subscribe to ‘Cost of Glory’ ⬅️ (listen on: Spotify or Apple Podcast) and follow Alex’s explorations of the greatest stories from Roman and Greek antiquity.

It’s like a time machine for the mind, and might inspire you to read some of the great books we recommend near the end of the podcast!

In this episode, Alex and I discuss why the Romans and Greeks of Antiquity were 𝕤𝕠 𝕒𝕨𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕞𝕖 and his journey following in Plutarch’s footsteps — telling stories of real heroes and learning from their lives. Except Alex does it with a podcast instead of with a reed pen (I had to look up what they used to write in antiquity…)

There’s a lot to love about this one. One of my favorite parts is when we do a lightning-round through a bunch of big names from the era, and Alex gives a highlight on each. We discuss people like Alexander the Great, Sulla, Hannibal, Scipio, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, Xenophon, etc.

It gave me a lot of context about names I recognized but didn’t know much about — I feel better equipped to dig deeper! I hope it’ll do the same for you.

Enjoy! 💚 🥃

👇 Other Great Links For You

* Cost of Glory Substack 📩📫

* Cost of Glory Free eBook on Oratory 📙🗣️

* Alex’s Guide on How to Read All of Plutarch's Lives 📖📚

* Alex’s Interview w/ Nat Friedman on the Mysteries of the Scrolls 📜🤖

* Follow Alex on Twitter/X 🐦

Of course, we can’t talk about everything, and this isn’t meant to be a structured primer (for that, see below). It’s just a mostly unstructured conversation among friends, discussing whatever we find interesting in the space.

We focus mostly on TSMC and Texas Instruments because that’s the two companies that MBI has researched more deeply, but we touch on ideas and concepts that apply more broadly.

The goal is mostly to make you curious about this magic sand and encourage you to go down that rabbit hole too (we have book recommendations at the end if you don’t know where to start).

We also brainstormed an interesting proposal to create a US alternative to TSMC (USSMC?).

📄🕵️‍♂️ MBI’s Semiconductor Deep Dives 🩻🔍

* Semiconductors: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" (sub required 🔐)

* Texas Instruments: Leading the Analog Chips Industry (sub required 🔐)

* TSMC: The Most Mission-Critical Company on Earth (sub required 🔐)

I’m a big fan of Denis Villeneuve, and I was due for a re-watch of ‘Sicario’ (2015, written by Taylor Sheridan).

It was the perfect opportunity to nerd out about the film, so I recruited my OSV colleagues Ed William (🇬🇧) and Dylan O’Sullivan (🇮🇪) for that task. (You should follow them on Twitter, and while you’re at it, sign up for the OSV Substack so you don’t miss the cool stuff we’ve got coming.)

The things you love are always better when you can share them with others and this is exactly what we do here. We go over every aspect of the film, from the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the music, the metaphors, and scene-by-scene analysis.

But mostly, we have fun and I hope that you do too!

If you’ve never seen the film, watch it before listening, as the podcast is one giant 🚨SPOILER🚨 — and if you’ve seen it but haven’t rewatched it, I hope we can convince you to do so and that you’ll notice a bunch of new cool details this time around.

🎧 Listen on Spotify

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 More Film & TV Podcasts 🎥

* 🎧 The Last of Us: Going Deep on HBO's Amazing Show with Matt Reustle and Tinkered Thinking 🍄

* 🎧 'Severance' Season 1: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 David Senra on Deadwood (also: founders, entrepreneurs, civilization, Henry Singleton, Walt Disney, David Ogilvy, etc)

💚 🥃 Enjoyed this? Want more? 👇

You can become a paid supporter to get 1-2x additional editions/week + access to the private Discord + support the recording of more podcasts.

In this conversation, we cover a lot of things from the Trung Expanded Universe, from the network effect at companies like Twitter/X and Facebook to Chernobyl and partying in Vietnam, we talk about creating online and how he got so good at solving the Twitter puzzle, what we learned from Rick Rubin and our mutual love of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Christopher Nolan, writing a newsletter, doing a podcast, how AI is changing things and why he’s building Bearly.AI, and how ambitions of becoming a screenwriter morphed into something else thanks to the permissionless internet.

I had a lot of fun recording this, and I hope it translates when you listen! 💚 🥃

Here’s the podcast with Bill Simmons that Trung recommends about 45 minutes into our conversation:

* 🎧 How I Built This with Guy Raz — The Ringer: Bill Simmons

🎙️ More from Trung 📩

Make sure you subscribe to Trung’s newsletter (📩). It’s a mix of long-form features about various companies, products, technologies, entrepreneurs, and funny short-form memes and jokes.

The same issue could cover both the science and engineering that went into making iPhone glass more shatter and scratch-resistant using space-age tech AND a meme about wealthy vampires because of compound interest.

If you need even more Trung, please make sure to subscribe to ‘Not Investment Advice’, the hilarious and educational podcast that he co-hosts with Jack Butcher and Bilal Zaidi.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about it without talking about Mark Zuckerberg, so we try to better understand how he thinks about the company that he founded when he was 19, and how he compares to other founders.

There was a lot to cover, and I think we touched on most of the big things: Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Reality Labs (AR/VR), AI, Threads, regulators, competitors, high-variance founders, and even cage matches (😬)…

It was a fun conversation for me, I hope you have as much fun listening to it (and learn a few things about Meta too)! 💚 🥃

For more on Meta, check out MBI’s excellent coverage at MBI Deep Dives. He has 10 posts on the company, but I’m going to highlight 5 of them:

📄 MBI Deep Dives — META Coverage 🔐

* Meta's Moat

* Meta's Achilles Heel(s)

* Meta 2Q'23 Earnings Update

* Meta Needs A Decade Of Efficiency

* What’s embedded in Meta’s stock price? (2022)

🗄 More podcasts with MBI 🕵️‍♂️

* 🎧 Microsoft: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI) 🕵️‍♂️🩻

* 🎧 Big Tech Compensation: Going Deep with MBI

* 🎧 Going Deep on Cloudflare and Datadog with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 Going deep on Payments with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI): Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard!

* 🎧 'Severance' Season 1: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

Our starting point is his Deep Dive on Microsoft, which I strongly recommend:

* 📄 Microsoft: The Quintessential Technology Company (sub. required)

It’s an excellent primer and even if you’ve been following Microsoft for a while, I bet you’ll learn a few things!

In the podcast, we dive deep into Microsoft and draw parallels with other Big Tech companies and their founders. Particularly between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but we also discuss Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.

We also talk about the company’s history of spectacular profitable growth, the Gates era, the Ballmer era, and the ongoing Nadella era. We also look at how Microsoft is positioned in the cloud market against Amazon's AWS and Google’s GCP. ☁️☁️☁️

My goal with this podcast is to help you get to know Jim better, from his origin story to his early career in finance and quantitative investing, the writing of his influential book, all the way to the seeds of the idea that became O’Shaughnessy Ventures (OSV) where I now work (more on that below) and how we see the past and future of the Media space.

I hope that you will enjoy our conversation and learn a few things even if you’ve been following Jim for years. If this is your introduction to him, I hope you’ll come out on the other side feeling like you have a good understanding of who he is, what his North Star is, and what he’s building. 🏗️🛠️

For more context about my joining OSV, see this piece that I wrote about it:

* Why I took the job of Head of Infinite Media at O'Shaughnessy Ventures! (OSV) 💡

Also, make sure to add Infinite Loops to your podcast player and subscribe to the Infinite Loops substack to keep track of what comes next!

He not only influenced my life directly through his works & ideas but he’s also cited as an inspiration and influence by many of the people that I admire, so I’m sure there’s an indirect influence too!

Among other things, we discuss his new book (order your copy today!), creativity, the impact of AI, how to create family traditions and rites of passage, Universal Personal Interns (UPIs), what is scarce in the universe, making friends with older and younger people, and more.

Please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with the inimitable K.K.! 💚 🥃

If you haven’t seen the show, bookmark this and come back after you’ve seen it. It’s a show worth seeing without spoilers!

I’m very pleased that my friends Matt Reustle (🎧🎙️) and Tinkered Thinking (✍️📚) joined me to discuss what may very well turn out to be my favorite TV shows of the year.

Above is one of my fave shots. I’m mad that I forgot to mention it in the podcast!

Context: Joel wakes up in a panic because he fell asleep during his night watch. He turns around and Ellie is watching over him with the rifle.

🎧 Listen on Spotify 🍄

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts 🍄

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 Watch on Youtube 🍄

💚 🥃 For more, please subscribe:

🗄 More from the Archives 🍄

* 🎧 David Senra and Jimmy Soni: 'The Founders' Book Club on the PayPal Mafia 📖

* 🎧 Big Tech Compensation: Going Deep with MBI

* 🎧 'Severance' Season 1: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 David Senra on Deadwood (also: founders, entrepreneurs, civilization, Henry Singleton, Walt Disney, David Ogilvy, etc)

* 🎧 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2023 Edition: Exploration as a Service)

* 🎧 Going Deep on the Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power with Mark Nelson (Part 1 of 2) 🔌⚡️💡

* 🎧 Claude Shannon fan club with Jimmy Soni and David Senra 📖

* 🎧 Podcast #6: Jimmy Soni on the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, etc), startups, tech, the research process, and much more

* 🎧 David Senra of Founders Podcast (Podcast #11)

* 🎧 Cedric Chin: What Operators can Teach Investors, the Study of Expertise, Knowledge Shields, and More (Podcast #10)

* 🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

🐕

🎠🕹️

🌳🦒🦒

We discuss Jimmy’s excellent book The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, while taking 57 different tangents and detours into things that we find interesting or that are indirectly connected to the main story.

I hope you enjoy this special Book Club edition!

📃 Full transcript (human-corrected and everything!)

* Transcript: David Senra and Jimmy Soni: 'The Founders' Book Club on the PayPal Mafia 📖

🎙 Previous Book Club on Claude Shannon 📘📗📕🐁

* 🎧 Claude Shannon fan club with Jimmy Soni and David Senra 📖

💚 🥃 Enjoyed this? Want more? 👇

You can become a paid supporter to get 2x additional editions/week + access to the private Discord + support the recording of more podcasts:

Subscribe to Liberty’s Highlights

If this is not your bag, you’re in luck! MBI did this work for you and shared his findings in a post.

But that’s just a starting point: In today’s episode, we go deep into Big Tech compensation, and MBI shares additional thoughts and analysis based on feedback he received after publishing his work.

We discuss Apple, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta.

For a lot more good stuff from Mostly Borrowed Ideas (💎🐕), sign up for MBI Deep Dives (now is the best time to sign up, because prices are going up on March 1st, 2023).

🎧 Listen on Spotify

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 Watch on Youtube

📃 Full transcript of the podcast

* Transcript: Big Tech Compensation: Going Deep with MBI

🎙 More podcasts with MBI:

* 🎧 Going Deep on Cloudflare and Datadog with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 'Severance' Season 1: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

* 🎧 Going deep on Payments with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI): Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard!

* 🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

🗄 More Podcasts from the Archives

* 🎧 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2023 Edition: Exploration as a Service)

* 🎧 Going Deep on the Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power with Mark Nelson (Part 1 of 2) 🔌⚡️💡

* 🎧 Claude Shannon fan club with Jimmy Soni and David Senra 📖

* 🎧 Podcast #6: Jimmy Soni on the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, etc), startups, tech, the research process, and much more

* 🎧 David Senra of Founders Podcast (Podcast #11)

* 🎧 Cedric Chin: What Operators can Teach Investors, the Study of Expertise, Knowledge Shields, and More (Podcast #10)

💚 🥃 Enjoyed this? Want more? 👇

You can become a paid supporter to get 2 additional editions/week + access to the private Discord + support the recording of more podcasts:

This is the third time I have interviewed David — he’s that interesting! For more context, you can find the previous two interviews linked below.

In this one, David shares his journey as an investor, talks about how Scuttleblurb started and how it’s doing these days, and who inspired him to get started (if Scuttleblurb is the grand-daddy of a lot of current ‘deep dive’ newsletters, who’s the great-grand-daddy?).

It’s a two-way conversation, so we also talk about what I’m doing.

We also touch on some businesses: Carvana (😬), Texas Instruments (🐜), Sherwin-Williams (🎨), and Transdigm (🛩️).

David has a great riff about the various approaches to investing and the trade-offs inherent to each. He also discusses the EQ aspects of investing, which can sometimes be overlooked in favor of the IQ side of things (where there’s also a fluid vs crystalized intelligence dynamic at play over time).

David also talks about the two kinds of errors in investing, with examples for each (Twitter & Coinbase!), and when more information can help and when more information can potentially hurt you.

📃 Full transcript of the podcast

* Transcript: Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2023 Edition)

🗣️ More interviews with David Kim

* 📄 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2020)

* 📄 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2022 Edition)

🤫 🚨NOTE ON SPOILERS 🚨🤐

This podcast has a SPOILER-FREE INTRO.

The spoilers only start after the “spoiler horn” about 11 minutes into it (you can’t miss it 📢).

So even if you haven’t seen the show, you can listen to the first part — I hope it piques your curiosity and convinces you to check it out!

For more of my thoughts on Severance, I also wrote about it in edition #354 (with both a spoiler-free intro and then spoilers).

I hope you enjoy it.

Covering a TV show is a bit different (David Senra and I discussed Deadwood). But MBI and I still end up talking about Google, Warren Buffett, technological disruption, capital allocation, value creation vs value capture, and workplace productivity. So it’s still us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We also run a few thought experiments: Would we ever consider getting severed ourselves? Can we imagine scenarios where that would be convincing? If this were offered, what percentage of the population would do it?

What about you?

The podcast even has some trivia near the end with a Claude Shannon connection!

I had a great time discussing these two very interesting companies with my friend MBI (💎🐕).

When I saw on his 2022 deep dive calendar that he was going to write about Cloudflare and Datadog, I knew we had to find time to talk about them at some point, since I had independently studied both and had a few things to say.

We discuss the businesses, technology, products, and management.

We also analyze the rise and fall of cloud software stocks over the past few years, issues with stock-based compensation, competition for engineers from Big Tech, how profitable can these companies be at maturity, and a bunch of other related topics and companies.

📃 Full transcript

* Going Deep on Cloudflare and Datadog with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (Transcript)

🎙 More podcasts with MBI:

* 🎧 Going deep on Payments with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI): Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard!

* 🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

We got together for a very special occasion. To talk about this man:

Claude Shannon was both a genius and a very authentic human being, and I think more people should learn from him — understanding his masterwork, Information Theory, helps to understand the digital world, but I also strongly believe that reading about how he lived his life can help steer us to a deeper, more satisfying life for ourselves.

Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman wrote an excellent biography of Shannon, and this book is the starting point for today’s episode.

But in our usual fashion, we don’t stop there and make all kinds of connections to all kinds of other things and people (Ed Thorp, Henry Singleton, Warren Buffett, Vannevar Bush, Dee Hock, Benjamin Franklin, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, etc).

💚 🥃 Enjoyed this? Want more? 👇

If you enjoyed this and would like more, you can become a paid supporter to get 2x extra editions/week + access to the private Discord + support the recording of more podcasts.

The main topic is Deadwood (HBO, 2004-2006) and what can be learned from the show, but of course, this being David & I, we also talk about:

* founders,

* entrepreneurs,

* obsessive creators,

* the power of focus,

* the power of strategy,

* how civilization emerges,

* intelligence as a currency,

* violence as humanity’s fatal flaw,

* sanitized origin stories,

* addiction & abuse,

* Andrew Carnegie,

* Henry J. Kaiser,

* Henry Singleton,

* David Ogilvy,

* Walt Disney,

* Warren Buffett,

* planting seeds,

* optionality from future technology,

* the lessons of history about violence and corruption,

* and all kinds of other interesting things.

We also talk about Tombstone (1993), which I hadn’t seen at the time, but watched soon after we recorded. I shared some thoughts on it here in edition #338.

If you liked the pod and want more, please consider becoming a paid supporter (💚 🥃).

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 Watch on YouTube

📃 Full transcript

* Full transcript of this podcast with MBI about payments

I really enjoyed this conversation about the payments space and I hope you will too!

$PYPL $SQ $AAPL $GOOG $AMZN

If you want to dig deeper, here are a bunch of useful links:

🔥 MBI’s payments deep dives:

* Shopify (there’s a big payment component)

* Square (aka Block)

* Adyen

* PayPal

🔥 David Kim’s payments deep dives at Scuttleblurb:

* Visa/Mastercard (part 1 of 3)

* Payments series (covering: FISV, GPN, FIS, SQ, Stripe, Adyen, part 1 of 4)

* Some thoughts on Fiserv / First Data (FISV)

* Square & PayPal (part 1 of 2)

* Square and PayPal: Comparing Business Models and Strategies

Also make sure to check out the two interviews I did with David (he’s great):

* Interview #1 with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb

* Interview #2 with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2022 Edition)

🎧 Jimmy Soni podcast interview on his PayPal book:

* Podcast #6: Jimmy Soni on the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, etc), startups, tech, the research process, and much more

🎧 Previous podcast with MBI on Constellation Software:

* Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

🙌 A Word From Our Sponsor: YOU! 🫵

If you enjoy the podcasts and the newsletter and aren’t already a supporter, please consider joining.

It’s quick and inexpensive, and makes a big difference in making it possible for me to do this full-time and send you more goodies:

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid supporter. 🎩

What I learned most from David is the power of focus and knowing what it takes to do great work. We talk about it in the context of what we do, but I’m sure it translates to whatever you’re trying to achieve.

I’ll just say that I bet no other single podcast in the history of the world will have covered Ed Thorpe, Michael Jordan, Mark Leonard, Rick Rubin, Edwin Land, Charlie Munger, Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, Claude Shannon, Warren Buffett, and Jim Simmons… in the same episode!

I really really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you’ll do too.

🎧 Listen on Spotify

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 Watch on YouTube

📃 Full transcript

* Transcript for Podcast #11: David Senra of Founders Podcast

When you’ve listened to it, please join the conversation and let us know what you think by leaving a comment:

Want more David Senra?

* 🎧 David Senra on Deadwood (also: founders, entrepreneurs, civilization, Henry Singleton, Walt Disney, David Ogilvy, etc) 🤠

Other podcasts mentioned in this episode

We also mention two previous podcasts (sometimes it feels like my pods are like the Marvel universe — there are references between the ‘franchises’). If you’re curious about them, here are convenient links:

* 🎧Podcast #6: Jimmy Soni on the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, etc), startups, tech, the research process, and much more

* 🎧 Cedric Chin: What Operators can Teach Investors, the Study of Expertise, Knowledge Shields, and More (Podcast #10)

🏃‍♂️💰 More on Ed Thorpe 🧠 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

What good timing!

David and I spent a fair amount of time talking about Ed Thorpe on the podcast, and right after we were done recording, friend-of-the-show and OG supporter (💚 🥃 🎩) Nick Ellis pointed me to a podcast that Tim Ferriss has just released:

* Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets — Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough Is Enough (#596)

🙌 A Word From Our Sponsor: YOU! 🫵

If you enjoy the podcasts and the newsletter and aren’t already a supporter, please consider joining.

It’s quick and inexpensive, and makes a big difference in making it possible for me to do this full-time and send you more goodies:

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 🥷

Cedric (💚 🥃 🇸🇬) is an operator who specializes — obsesses? — in learning how to extract knowledge from experts and businesspeople, the people in the trenches actually doing stuff.

In this conversation, we discuss how traditional Chinese businessmen without formal education structure deals, cognitive flexibility theory (it sounds fancy, but it’s quite practical), cognitive transformation theory, and why some people can reach mastery in their fields while others cannot (I really like the “knowledge shield” concept🛡 🤯).

There’s a discussion on keeping an open mind on crypto (are we just too old?), how to re-encode old lessons after you got up in skill level so that you can let go of the things that you originally learned that were wrong, what is a “business biologist” (treating businesses as animals, trying to understand how the environments in which they have evolved have shaped them and why they are adapted to their ecological niches…), etc.

We even talk about Morris Chang’s journey at Texas Instruments and TSMC! (make sure to check out the excellent episode of the Acquired Podcast on TSMC and Chang)

Bonus special segment at the end about the very special science-fiction of author Iain M. Banks.

For a lot more from Cedric, check out the excellent Commonplace (aka Commongcog blog! He discusses the dual branding challenge in the pod…):

* Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog

Listen on Spotify

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

📺 Watch on YouTube

Full Transcript

If you prefer to read or want to save a section in your notes, here’s a convenient transcript of the whole podcast:

* Transcript: Podcast #10 with Cedric Chin

More Liberty Podcasts

For more podcasts, you can see all previous episodes here:

* Liberty’s Highlights Podcast archive

Thank you! 👋

🙌 A Word From Our Sponsor: YOU! 🫵

If you enjoy the podcasts and the newsletter and aren’t already a supporter, please consider joining.

It’s quick and inexpensive, and makes a big difference in making it possible for me to do this full-time and send you more goodies:

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 🤠

🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

Once again, thank you so much for the support and for sending questions for this AMA. I hope you enjoy it!

For more podcasts, check out the whole back-catalogue:

* Liberty’s Highlights Podcast archive

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast feed on Spotify

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

* Liberty’s Highlights podcast on Apple

There’s also a pod I did with friend-of-the-show and supporter (💚 🥃) Jim O’Shaughnessy, which is probably as good a place as any to get an overview of my story, if you’re new around here (👋):

* LibertyRPF — The Great Reshuffle & Decline of Gatekeepers (EP.72)

🙌 A Word From Our Sponsor: YOU! 🫵

If you enjoy the podcasts and the newsletter and you aren’t already a supporter, please consider joining. It’s quick and inexpensive, and makes a big difference in making it possible for me to do this full-time and send you more goodies:

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 👨‍💻

🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

I need to get a new joke, I made the same cheesy joke at the beginning as on the episode about Constellation Software with MBI… 😬

We talk about Rob’s days on Wall Street and his journey turning Koyfin from a blank piece of paper to what it is today. There’s a bonus topic at the end where we discuss Twitter and Elon Musk.

If you’re a supporter, you can read the full transcript here:

* Podcast Transcript: Koyfin CEO & Co-Founder Rob Koyfman

If you prefer to listen on Spotify:

* Spotify: Koyfin CEO & Co-Founder Rob Koyfman (Podcast interview)

💚 🥃 If you like these podcasts and want more, please consider becoming a supporter, it allows me to continue doing this project and makes a big difference:

For more, see the interview (text, not audio) that I did with Rob and Koyfin co-founder Rich Meatto last year:

* Interview with Koyfin co-Founders Rob Koyfman and Rich Meatto

If you’re a front-end engineer, here’s the job listing that Rob mentions at the end of the pod:

* Job listing: Senior Frontend Engineer at Koyfin

Here’s about half the Koyfin team in Ukraine (they’re around 20 total):

Going back in time

To close, I can’t help but repost these very early mockups and screenshots of Koyfin (what an evolution to what it is today!):

Bonus: From the Archives

Original Wireframe

Rob: Here are the wireframes that were in the original pitch deck. We’ve evolved since then, huh? The key elements were that Koyfin would be a full screen web application. Early on I thought a command bar with shortcuts would be central to what we do. And lastly a focus on graphing and data visualization. The wireframe below shows margins and forward returns for Micron (MU).

Version 1

Rob: I remember the first time the developers came back with a prototype and I was horrified. WTF is this? It’s really ugly. I quickly learned we need a UI/UX designer. Now I needed to figure out where to find this designer. I went to the place where you can find anything: Craigslist. We hired May who designed version 1 of Koyfin, before Rich joined.

In version 1, we were generous with the bright blue, and bright colors in general. Look at that awesome graph, and it has annotations too! Users quickly started requesting dark mode, for obvious reasons.

This is when the side menu started appearing, along with keyboard shortcuts. This version had Home, Top News and Monitors (Watchlists).

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 🤠

📃 Full transcript:

* Podcast Transcript: Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

🎧 Listen on Spotify:

* Spotify: Going deep on Constellation Software with MBI

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts:

* Apple: Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

📺 Watch on YouTube

🔥 Constellation Software deep dive by MBI:

* CSI: Software Santa eating the VMS market (inexpensive sub required)

🎧 See also my other podcast with MBI:

* Going deep on Payments with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI): Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard!

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 💙

This isn’t a typical ‘promo interview’ with an author who’s launching a book. It’s more like sitting at the same table as two friends who are catching up.

We spend maybe 1/2 of the time talking about PayPal $PYPL and the ‘main characters’ (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, etc), and the rest of the time we mostly went up a few levels of abstraction to talk about business, entrepreneurship, technology, startups, human nature, writing, the research process, Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Michael Jordan’s Last Dance, transferrable skills between disciplines, craftsmanship, how to become really good at something, etc. (oh, and Deadwood was mentioned, of course 🤠)

I hope you enjoy it!

Jimmy was gracious enough to offer 10 signed copies of the book to supporters of this show — I picked the winners with a bingo machine randomizing software earlier today and they’ll get an email soon asking for their shipping details. The others will also get one to let them know they didn’t get it this time (there were 51 names on the list, so the odds of winning were 19.6%).

If you want more traditional interviews with Jimmy that focus more on the story in the book, here are two good ones that I can recommend:

Make sure to also get Jimmy’s book on Claude Shannon.

The father of information theory had a very interesting way of thinking about life — reminding me a bit of Richard Feynman and Ed Thorp, in some ways — and he deserves to be known by everyone and be as much of a brand name as Einstein…

Now I’ve got to go watch The Defiant Ones…

What have I learned from doing this?

It took me about 2 hours to edit the podcast.

Mostly just some polish, shortening long pauses, removing a few of my numerous verbal tics (I wish I could’ve gotten all of them — there’s nothing like listening to yourself talking for over an hour to realize how many filler words you say in conversation), removed background noise from a section, etc. I also normalized the audio volume and added a bit of compression to reduce the dynamic range a bit.

Nothing too major, just wanted to make it sound a bit smoother for you.

While I like the artisanal editing process in Audacity, I’m thinking that if I ever start doing more of these, I may need to go with something like Descript to automate more of it.

I gotta ask my podcasting friends about their workflows… 🤔

Liberty’s Highlights is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 💆🏻

🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

I wrote about the changes I made a few editions ago, but then I wanted to spent some time just living with the system and refining it to have a better idea of what I thought of it.

This is a snapshot in time, giving my current thoughts about why I think it’s worth putting some time and energy into, what the different apps are and what some of their pros and cons are, and what I’m doing myself specifically.

I expect this to keep evolving, so if you’re reading/listening in the future, don’t assume that everything here is still exactly the same for me.

(as usual with the podcast format, I feel like I forgot to say a ton of things and wish I could edit and add things as easily as with text, but gotta accept the pros and cons of each medium…)

(And here’s the big news this morning! Koyfin paid plans & even more features! I’ll cover in more detail tomorrow… I became a small investor in Koyfin earlier this year because I love the product and the team, and have been living in the app for a few years. Really happy to see them keep evolving and building more great features!)

Obsidian Screenshots

This shows the whole window (you can change the appearance, there’s a zillion themes with very different looks, but this is my fave one right now — it’s called ‘Obsidian gruvbox’).

You can see the folder structure on the left, and on the right I have a calendar view (if I click on a day, it takes me to that day’s daily page), the page outline (you can click on a sub-title to jump to that part of the document), and a mini-graph view that shows what this page links to.

The view above is the editor view, so you see the markdown code (if you’re familiar with HTML code, this is like a super-super-simplified version of that).

You can switch to ‘preview’ mode, which shows the rendered page without the code. They’ll soon be adding the ability to edit from preview mode, but Markdown is pretty easy to learn.

You basically do stuff like this [[link]] or *this* and it renders as links or italics or put dashes in from of stuff to have a bulleted list or whatever..

If you want to give it a try, Obsidian is free and multi-platform (mobile apps in beta right now, but coming). And the devs and community are constantly cranking out new features, improvements, and new useful plug-ins. Very vibrant software.

This is what my daily page template looks like. You can create your own template, and every day a new page is created using today’s date and will contain whatever you put in the template.

What I call my “daily highlight” in the “to do” section is the most important thing I’d like to do that day.

That’s my graph view.

Every bright dot is a note, every dark gray dot is a link that is created, but the page hasn’t be created yet, and the other colors (brow and blue) are tags and files.

In the app, this is an interactive view, like a Google Maps view. You can zoom in, see the names of the files on each dot, when you hover your mouse over one it shows what other notes it links too, and you can click on any to see that page. It’s very cool.

Update: For those who want to give Obsidian a try, check out this 6-part series of Obsidian video tutorial by Nick Milo.

It’s the best way I’ve found to take a running start at that learning curve, and it’s what helped me get started.

What I Learned Recording this Podcast

Don’t have much to say about this recording experience. It was fairly straightforward.

This is what the project looks like in Audacity:

You can’t see it on this, but I did a bunch of edits, took me about an hour to do surgery on the raw audio… And it’s far from perfect, but at a certain point you just have to call it done and move on to the next thing.

Note: I’m still using my son’s toy piano for intro and outro music.

This is my first time doing an AMA like this. I guess this counts as a 𝕤𝕡𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕒𝕝 𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟…

I wasn’t expecting questions about the meaning of life, free will, how the world works, and our place the universe, but I like people who are thinking big thoughts.

I gave it my best shot.

I don’t have all the answers, or even many answers — I just want to learn — but it’s more fun to learn together. And sometimes, just asking questions is enough to get the process started, even if it takes a long time to find satisfactory answers (or better questions!).

I recorded the intro in one take, and then I recorded all my answers in a single take too. It’s pretty stream-of-consciousness, with no real preparation (no time for it lately).

I cut some of my answers in post-production, in the interest of time and because on some I just didn’t have much of interest to say.

Being used to text, it feels very weird to realize there’s stuff I forgot to say, or didn’t say clearly, and I can’t go back and just add it in there (or I could, but it’d sound weird and take too much time). Gotta just accept the pros and cons of the medium ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m curious to know what you think of this experiment, positive and negative, and whether you think I should do it again at some point in the future.

What I Learned Recording It 🤔

This is the first recording using my new audio gear.

Big improvement over the $30 computer mic I got in 2006 to do Skype calls.

If you’re curious:

* Microphone: Rode Podmic (photo at the top)

* Audio interface: Focusrite Scarlett 2i2

* Microphone stand: Gator Short Mic Stand (with heavy metal base because the Podmic is 2lbs, and with the first stand I bought, it just kept tipping over)

* In-line pre-amp: Triton Fethead (the Podmic is nice, but as a dynamic mic, it’s pretty quiet without this boost, and the Scarlett has trouble driving it)

If the little intro music and sound effects sound like they come from a toy piano, it’s because they do. I just grabbed my youngest son’s piano and did slides and random notes:

Improvise with what you’ve got, right?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I did the post-production editing in Audacity (compression, normalization of levels, cutting some parts, cutting some crutch words like “um”, slicing in the little piano parts, etc) and final mastering in Forecast. The post probably took an hour.

This is what the final thing looks like: