More podcasts

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I'm being slowly crushed down by two babies, a startup and physics research!

Here are more podcast recommendations. The first two are hilarious, despite the serious topics!

Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers (previously profiled here) discusses the evolution of deceit and self-deception. It's plausible to me that the ability to decieve yourself is adaptive -- it makes it easier to lie convincingly, vilify your enemies, justify your actions, etc.

Trilogy co-founder and CEO Joe Liemandt describes how he dropped out of Stanford and ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt to start his company. Although it's a big, well-known software company, I never knew what Trilogy actually did until I listened to this podcast. Their original product was a "configurator" which solved very complicated constraints (i.e., compatibility of components) faced by computer manufacturers like Silicon Graphics, HP and IBM. Nowadays Liemandt describes their software as performing constrained, object-oriented database search. He conveys just how tough and exhilarating it is to start a company.

Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to start TheFaceBook, strikes me as a naturally talented entrepreneur, despite his youth (he is still in his early twenties). With over 5 million users (many of them obsessive), TheFaceBook is set to surpass Google in number of pageviews per day! Given the positive network effects for social software, and the fact that at many schools something like 80+ percent of students already use TheFaceBook, I don't see how competitors will ever displace these guys.