One of my favorite thing about being alive in 2018 is the incredible access we have to great thinkers. 50 years ago, the only way to learn from a great thinker (who wasn’t a professor) was to hope they write a book, to be close enough to know them personally or to catch a highly edited clip of them on the news.
Today, we have incredible access to the insights and ideas of great thinkers through various forms of media, but the explosion of podcasts over the past decade, in particular, has given us a unique ability to understand the way they think.
There is something very different about a person putting out an edited book or article and them just sitting down and having a conversation. Some ideas come out better in book form, but many of the overlooked assumptions and interesting way of being that is ignored in a magnum opus comes out in a conversation.
I was thinking about this today because of the two great examples from this week.
The first is Elon Musk on Joe Rogan’s podcast last Thursday. They drank whiskey, smoked a blunt and talked about everything from electric cars to becoming cyborgs and terraforming Mars.
And the second is an interview with Peter Thiel released today on the Rubin Report.
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are two very unique, interesting, and successful entrepreneurs that are worth studying and now that we have unconstrained podcasts we can do exactly that.
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