North Star Podcast
Rob Henderson is one of my favorite up-and-coming writers. I like him because he's one of those people who doesn't fit into a category. He's a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, but I met him in a book club about technological stagnation. He's spent years in the academy, first at Yale and now at Cambridge, but most of his influence comes from his online writing. Most of all, he's interested in human nature. In particular, psychology, status, and social class.
info_outline Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega: How Childhood Education Will ChangeNorth Star Podcast
This week, I have two guests. Both are affiliated with Synthesis, a new kind of online school where kids learn through games and simulations. One is Chrisman Frank, the CEO of Synthesis. The other is Ana Lorena Fabrega, who is their Chief Evangelist.
info_outline Ash Fontana: Building Artificial IntelligenceNorth Star Podcast
Ash Fontana is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. As an entrepreneur, he was only of the early employees at an online investing platform called AngelList. From there, he became the Managing Director at Zetta, the first investment fund focused on artificial intelligence. Now, he's the author of the AI-First Company.
info_outline Li Jin: Creating the Creator EconomyNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Li Jin, the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital firm called Atelier.
info_outline Zena Hitz: Liberal Arts ThinkingNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Zena Hitz, a tutor at St John’s and the author of an excellent book called Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her book explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical.
info_outline Tiago Forte and Will Mannon: Building Cohort-Based CoursesNorth Star Podcast
I have two guests today: Tiago Forte and Will Mannon.
info_outline Gagan Biyani: Building Silicon Valley StartupsNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Gagan Biyani, the current CEO of an education startup that helps teachers run Cohort-Based Courses on the Internet and has students from around the world. Gagan also founded a multi-billion dollar online education platform called Udemy. Afterward, he founded Sprig, a food delivery platform that grew to a nine-digit valuation but eventually failed. So today, he has the distinct pleasure of being both the founder of a unicorn and the founder of a massive failure.
info_outline Trevor Bauer: Playing Professional BaseballNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Trevor Bauer, who is arguably the very best pitcher in Major League Baseball. I wanted to interview Trevor not only because he's an excellent pitcher, but because he takes a radical approach to the game. He's a physicist and a scientist. A scholar and an entrepreneur. And you don't find that combination very often.
info_outline Nik Sharma: Building DTC CompaniesNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Nik Sharma, the founder of Sharma Brands and an advisor to companies like Judy and Cha Cha Matcha. Nik is one of my very best friends, and my go-to person for all things commerce. Since we first met, we've spent hours exploring the future of marketing and commerce together, and recorded this podcast to give you a window into what our conversations are like.
info_outline Kevin Kelly: Seeing the FutureNorth Star Podcast
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. As one of the most important futurists of our generation, he's published a number of books including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules for the New Economy which is my favorite one. Coolest of all, he's also a founding member of the board of the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit devoted to encouraging long-term thinking.
info_outlineMy guest today is Nadia Eghbal, an independent researcher and the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. She currently works on the writer experience team at Substack. She did a lot of her research at Protocol Labs where she studied the production and economics of open source. Before that, she worked on the open source team at GitHub.
One of the core theses of her work is that open-source software projects don't have zero marginal cost. Maintenance can be expensive, even if the code itself is free to distribute. In this episode, we spoke about how sharing ideas on different platforms helps you express different sides of your personality, why GitHub is the center of the open source community, and what she learned running a grant program. Please enjoy my conversation with Nadia Eghbal.
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Shownotes
2:07 - Why the personal projects of a coder can unexpectedly turn into a massive public responsibility.
4:36 - The temporal nature of creating code aside from any other art form.
8:24 - How creators can become enslaved by their own systems.
12:37 - How Github differs from social media platforms, and why it might be that way on purpose.
14:54 - The similarities and differences of open source code and organized religion.
20:48 - How to efficiently externalize information to make more open source type projects possible.
24:29 - Why Nadia feels compelled to write everything down, even though to her it sometimes feels like a problem.
31:00 - How the bystander effect comes into play in the world of open source software development.
35:17 - Why Nadia believes that the way open source was started made it "set up to fail."
38:46 - The importance of granularity and modularity in maintenance, throughout people's personal and professional lives.
43:54 - What the consequences are to accepting code that causes problems downstream.
46:22 - Why Nadia chose to write and publish this book instead of going through the process of getting a PhD.
49:05 - What microgrants are, and how their different aspects play into research and development.
54:06 - How creative people can share their knowledge with each other better through story sharing.
57:28 - How Nadia focuses the scope of her projects from being too overly broad.
1:00:40 - The danger of thinking you ever know enough about any field that's not your own.