A Compulsive Search for the Most Interesting People with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Compound Manual

“Audio feels like a secret hiding in plain sight. It's leverage on both sides, and it's unbelievably easier to create something that's great in audio. It's also drastically easier to consume.”

“Every single day I spend my days talking to people that I think are at the fringes of distributions. Outliers in intelligence and interest and performance. Extreme people. And it's a compulsion more than it's a commitment. I cannot help myself. I do it every Saturday morning, nonstop, or every day, I'm just doing it. It's what I like to do.”

“If you're attuned to the thing you're interested in, you see breadcrumbs that are interesting everywhere. People like this tend to be on Twitter. Twitter is a powerful place because it's like a matching algorithm for people like this, but it's everywhere, not just Twitter.”

So, I think avoiding boredom is a great tactic for good interviewing. Your own boredom, not what you think others will want or care about. I think that defines a lot of the great interviewers. If you listen to Howard Stern interviewing somebody, it couldn't be a more different style than me. But I do think those two things are there. He's deeply cu... See more

I find myself all the time without a great piece of content to consume. And the demand-supply thing just hasn't reached an equilibrium yet, maybe it never will. And audio is unique in the sense that it is at least 10 times easier to create an unbelievable hour of audio for me, and my format's interview, interviewing someone great like David. That e... See more

“I want the next conversation that I record to be the best one I've done. That's certainly not always the case, or not always true, but we're always trying to think about what makes these good in the first place, and what can make them better.”

“How do we find as many hosts that we can serve, me being the first. And what can we arm them with to reach a bigger audience and do a better job, and extract as much interesting knowledge as possible? The mindset doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. That will lead us in really interesting directions.”

“And it has an emotional resonance, that the written word just can't match. If you read David's words versus listened to them, some huge percentage of the value would be lost. So that trifecta is amazing to me, much easier to create, much easier to consume, and much more impactful when consumed. Those are what make audio so powerful.”

Danny Meyer the restaurateur has called ABCD: “always be collecting dots, so that you can always be connecting dots.” Dots or breadcrumbs, if your whole life is oriented around that collection, which mine is, then you're always preparing.

“I'm not striving towards some end state for Colossus. Big, hairy, audacious goals may work some of the time, I'm actually very suspicious of them. I actually think most of the time they're very bad.”