Thursday, January 19, 2023

Dominic Cummings: Vote Leave, Brexit, COVID, and No. 10 with Boris — Manifold #28

 

Dominic Cummings is a major historical figure in UK politics. He helped save the Pound Sterling, led the Vote Leave campaign, Got Brexit Done, and guided the Tories to a landslide general election victory. His time in No. 10 Downing Street as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor was one of the most interesting and impactful periods in modern UK political history.  Dom and Steve discuss all of this and more in this 2-hour episode. 

0:00 Early Life: Oxford, Russia, entering politics 
16:49 Keeping the UK out of the Euro 
19:41 How Dominic and Steve became acquainted: blogs, 2008 financial crisis, meeting at Google 
27:37 Vote Leave, the science of polling 
43:46 Cambridge Analytica conspiracy; History is impossible 
48:41 Dominic on Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him and the movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War” 
54:05 On joining British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office: an ultimatum 
1:06:31 The pandemic 
1:21:28 The Deep State, talent pipeline for public service 
1:47:25 Quants and weirdos invade No.10 
1:52:06 Can the Tories win the next election? 
1:56:27 Trump in 2024? 



References: 

Dominic's Substack newsletter: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/

Thursday, January 05, 2023

Sahil Lavingia: Founding Gumroad, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, and our AI LLM future — Manifold #27

 

Sahil Lavingia founded Gumroad at the age of 19 and built it into a leading digital commerce platform. He is the author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur and an investor in early-stage startups. 

Steve and Sahil discuss: 

0:00 Sahil's upbringing and start as an entrepreneur 
9:35 Tech founder at 19 and VC investment from Kleiner-Perkins 
24:15 Backstory of Gumroad 30:30 Crowdfunding Gumroad 
37:09 Experiments with OpenAI LLM, ChatGPT, and the promise of AI 



References: 

Sahil's web page 

Ask My Book: interrogate Sahil's book via LLM