Antipessimists (Public Episodes)

Living in the balance of our beliefs (Yancey Strickler)

Tyler Willis — Wed, 13 May 2020 06:00:00 -0600

Yancey Strickler co-founded Kickstarter and speaks passionately about living in balance with our beliefs. As COVID-19 really started ramping up, we spent an hour discussing COVID, Yancey's new book, his philosophy of Bentoism, and more. Learn more about Yancey's philosophy here: http://bentoism.org/ Get Yancey's book "This Could be Our Future" here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/591594/this-could-be-our-future-by-yancey-strickler/

Homeschooling with Drew Wilson

Tyler Willis — Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:00 -0600

Drew is a successful founder, having sold his last company to GoDaddy. In celebration of the launch of @WithPrimer, I'm releasing this recording from October 2019 about how Drew views the journey he and his wife have gone on in homeschooling their children.

A new way to write and keep notes (Roam Research)

Tyler Willis — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 07:05:00 -0700

This episode is better in video, as we demo the Roam tool. The video can be found here: https://youtu.be/9znmODSYDwA

Learn what Roam Research is and how it makes writing and thinking easier. It's a bit like Evernote, but with a *very* different user experience that has inspired cult-like devotion from early users. This is an interview with Conor White-Sullivan, the founder of Roam.

Antipessimist is a peer-reviewed podcast that only publishes episodes that have been highly-rated by a hand-selected audience of early reviewers. Here are some of the quotes from the peer-reviewers on this episode:

- This is the deepest I've ever seen anyone go with Conor, the combination of tool review and philosophical exploration about why it matters is incredible.
- This is fascinating, I love the idea of opinionated software and creates “compound interest for thinking."
- The concept of Roam is AMAZING and I’m obsessed and excited to explore it more.
- Conor is a far more wide-ranging and philosophically interesting thinker than I thought he would have been.

Studying the arc of human progress

Tyler Willis — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 07:00:00 -0700

Here are some additional great links on Jason's work:

Jason giving a laundry list of progress: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-studies-a-civic-duty
The closest thing Jason has to a manifesto: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-studies-a-moral-imperative

Bashful Ambition: Finding the "Global Empire" Startups

Tyler Willis — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0600

Sumon Sadhu talks about "Bashful Ambition" and why it's the driving force behind creating big companies in new markets internationally. Sumon seems to be the only person focused on backing these seed-stage companies across many geographies; in this episode, he shares his thoughts on how to find, back, and support the builders of future national empires.

Hiring 4500 people in 18 months (building great people functions)

Tyler Willis — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0600

Nathaniel was the head of people at Hillary for America. He built a small people ops team that supported one of the largest hiring efforts in the last decade. I'm hard-pressed to think of any team that hired more people and achieved better outcomes in a shorter period of time with fewer resources. Pound for pound, it may be the most impressive People Ops function built in the last two decades, yet they still lost the election. Regardless of your politics, this is a fascinating story to reflect on.