The Knowledge Project

Hosted by Shane Parrish · 128 korrents · 8 episodes · 8 guests · fs.blog ↗

Shane Parrish did not write this page.

Each episode below lists what its guest said on the record, quoted word for word from the transcript the show publishes and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The sentence on each line is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Nothing the host ASKED is here, on any line: a question is not a belief, however confidently it is phrased. Where Shane Parrish asserts something in their own voice it is on their own page, never counted against a guest.

Guests

Benedict Evans 16 Bill Gurley 16 Gary Klein 16 James Clear 16 Marc Andreessen 16 Mark Pincus 16 Rory Sutherland 16 Seth Godin 16

Everything they said, in one feed →

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Bill Gurley9 Jun 2026 · 1h 01m · 16 korrents

Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley

Bill Gurley

Our page for this episode →Watch on youtube.com ↗

Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:00:26
Our reading
Complex systems are multivariable and nonlinear, so they can behave one way for years and then switch when a single variable changes.
Their wordsI would describe complex systems as multivariable nonlinear systems. And multivariable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way.
0:01:49
Our reading
Optimising a single metric is a trap, because the second-order consequences of the change only surface much later.
Their wordsyou got to be really conscious of the consequence and not get too deterministic about a single metric or a single variable and know what's important and what's on top.
0:06:38
Our reading
Information is more fragmented than ever and simultaneously more available than ever, and language models widen that access further.
Their wordsWe do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could. And that's even more true now with LLMs.
0:09:04
Our reading
Obsessive continuous learning is the common trait among entrepreneurs, because the disruptions they exploit sit on a moving edge.
Their wordsa more common trait that's related in the entrepreneurial world is obsessive learning like constant learning because the disruptions that allow for the technology waves that allow for companies to be disruptive and take market share from an incumbent are all tied to something dynamic that's happening on the edge.
0:10:59
Our reading
Knowing both the deep history of a field and its bleeding edge is what makes someone genuinely differentiated in it.
Their wordsI'm suggesting you should understand the really old stuff, the history, because it's differentiating and shows a passion and it gives you a great frame of mind, but you also want to really understand the new edge. If you do both of those things, like you're I think you're a power player in your field, you know.
0:13:56
Our reading
Costly and burdensome AI regulation would entrench an oligopoly, which is why some incumbents are asking to be regulated.
Their wordsthe regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive that could actually lead to more igopoly and I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.

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Mark Pincus2 Jun 2026 · 1h 09m · 16 korrents

FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products

Mark Pincus

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Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:00:21
Our reading
Great consumer products work because they answer a human instinct or need that was already being felt but was unexpressed and unmet.
Their wordsI think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They they speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling and it's been unexpressed or unmet. When we first experience that, there's something magical to it that it could be an unlock. And lots of times it's it's where we're most cynical that we're ready for the most magic.
0:12:32
Our reading
A person should run their own life strategically, choosing each year by what their future self would thank them for doing.
Their wordsI think that a practice like the book of life, what it's done for me and I think it could do for a lot of people is just be strategic about your life. Like be thoughtful about like I like say what would your future self thank you for doing this year. We can be strategic, hold ourselves accountable and and force ourselves to make some tougher decisions.
0:14:17
Our reading
Founders who fail early tend to attach themselves to that failure and start being defined by it, and the line between success and failure on a first company is very fine.
Their wordsI I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it
startups
0:15:07
Our reading
A founder has to run on what if everything goes right; starting from what if everything goes wrong is playing defense and losing before the start.
Their wordsAnd I don't know how you're going to get yourself there, but you've got to be in this place that you're thinking, you're also thinking, "What if everything goes right? What does right look like? How am I ready for everything going right?" If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defense and you've lost before you're even out of the gates.
0:25:48
Our reading
Users vote with their clicks, and roughly half of them are lost at every click a product asks for.
Their wordsThey vote with their clicks. You lose at least half your users every click. Every time you say click here, half people don't click. And you lose 80% when you say download this. At least that's probably 90 or more. 90% or more in the app store.
0:29:47
Our reading
Every founder falls into a structureless period after a company ends, and it is a dark place that seems to offer freedom before it starts to feel permanent.
Their wordsThe way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.

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James Clear1 Jan 2026 · 2h 13m · 16 korrents

The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clear

James Clear

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Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:01:34
Our reading
Habits stick because every repetition casts a vote for an identity, not because of the outcome any single repetition produces.
Their wordsSo one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So, when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote for being a writer. And no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for that identity.
0:03:05
Our reading
Belief and behavior run in both directions, so the more reliable way to change what someone believes about themselves is to act first.
Their wordsbehavior and belief is like two-way street. You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. And you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. And so, my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way.
0:04:32
Our reading
Small changes only compound when they are oriented toward a larger outcome; otherwise they evaporate rather than accumulate.
Their wordsare your small actions accumulating or are they evaporating? You know, are you doing small things each day that are oriented toward a larger outcome or are you doing small things each day that are just kind of like one-offs and don't really add up? In a lot of ways, I feel like the two time frames that matter most in life are 10 years and 1 hour
0:06:20
Our reading
Effort that produces no visible improvement is being stored rather than wasted, because results arrive at a threshold instead of steadily.
Their wordsthat work is not being wasted. It's just being stored. You know, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and it not melting yet. It's like, well, you just haven't hit the phase transition. So, but that's where people give up.
0:11:10
Our reading
The reliable method is to run many small experiments, commit fully to whatever works, and keep at it until it stops working.
Their wordsTry a number of things, right? So, experiment with a number of things. Run a number of small experiments. Once you find something that works, double down on it and then keep doing it until it stops working, which is the step that a lot of people skip. Um, and then once it stops working, go back to the start and try a lot of small experiments again.
0:15:19
Our reading
Behavior is governed by the surroundings, so a good habit only holds when it is the path of least resistance in the rooms a person occupies.
Their wordsYou want to you want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day, and the good habit is the path of least resistance. It's the easiest thing to do. And a lot of the time you walk into rooms and it's the distractions that are easier to do and you feel like you're swimming upstream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen.

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Rory Sutherland9 Dec 2025 · 2h 00m · 16 korrents

Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland

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Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:01:50
Our reading
People cannot choose without comparison, so an AI that hands over one perfect answer will not satisfy them.
Their wordspeople don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
0:03:56
Our reading
Pursuing efficiency pushes attention onto measurable factors and away from the psychological ones where the larger gains are available.
Their wordsBut when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
0:05:30
Our reading
Cutting a job defined by its narrowest function destroys the tacit value that job was quietly creating.
Their wordsthe dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
0:09:05
Our reading
Companies would often be better off moving a tenth to a fifth of their marketing budget into paying call centre staff properly.
Their wordsprobably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
0:09:46
Our reading
People judge an organisation by the humans they deal with, because judging other people is the task evolution equipped them for.
Their wordsWe don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.
0:28:30
Our reading
Publicly traded companies are incentivised to behave like psychopaths, because they are optimised for short-term transactions rather than long-term relationships.
Their wordsPLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.

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Benedict Evans2 Sept 2025 · 1h 11m · 16 korrents

Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans

Our page for this episode →Watch on youtube.com ↗

Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:01:39
Our reading
Another platform shift, not a break in history: the new technology will be built on for ten or fifteen years, then something else will replace it.
Their wordsMy sort of base case is to say this is kind of another platform shift and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next 10 or 15 years and then there'll be something else and so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts
0:03:40
Our reading
Being certain a technology matters tells you almost nothing about where its value will end up being captured.
Their wordsIt wasn't clear that the browser wasn't where the value capture was cuz Microsoft crowbarred its way into dominance in browsers but that turned out not to matter and then all the value is in search advertising and social which were 5 years later and 10 years later and so like you can be very very clear that this is the thing and then still be completely unclear how it's going to work.
0:06:08
Our reading
Incumbents have looked unbeatable at the start of every previous platform shift and have still lost.
Their wordsI'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
0:09:27
Our reading
What destroyed Kodak was not missing digital photography but that digital cameras were an undifferentiated low-margin commodity.
Their wordsfilm was this high margin product where they had a bunch of unique intellectual property and digital cameras are a low margin um commodity where they were competing with the entire consumer electronics industry with no differentiation.
0:12:07
Our reading
Proprietary data is not an advantage in training large language models, because no company's holdings are large enough to matter.
Their wordsI think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.
LLMs
0:15:02
Our reading
Studies showing a language model behaving badly prove nothing, because the model was asked to produce that behaviour.
Their wordsyou write murder is good on a piece of paper and you put it in a photocopier and you press go and you say my god the machine says murder's good. Well, no, you told the machine to say that. And that's what these anthropic studies are. They're basically you tell the machine to say a thing and then it says it like well you haven't proved anything.

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#105 · Seth Godin26 Mar 2024 · 1h 21m · 16 korrents

Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)

Seth Godin

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Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:08:49
Our reading
No business has everyone as its customer, so the goal is the smallest viable audience rather than the biggest possible one.
Their wordsnobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
0:09:30
Our reading
The internet is a micro medium: it reaches specific people better than any medium before it and reaches everyone badly.
Their wordsThe internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.
0:10:28
Our reading
Even the most commercially successful books are written for a very small group of people rather than for everyone.
Their wordsUh Harry Potter, the most successful uh book franchise in history, it made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one. Right? That book is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who like to remember what was like to be a precocious 12-year-old. That's not everyone. That's a very small group of people.
0:11:39
Our reading
Naming a narrow audience puts a creator on the hook, while claiming the work is for everyone is a way to hide from failure.
Their wordsthe way to be on the hook is to say, "This is only for people who are like this." Because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say, "This is for everyone," you're allowed to hide behind, "Well, everyone hasn't found it yet."
0:17:41
Our reading
Reading and listening are only preparation; learning happens by doing, and it consists of failing on the way to mastery.
Their wordsThe only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.
0:25:24
Our reading
Leaving an old relationship for a new one is usually shopping for novelty rather than refusing to honour a sunk cost.
Their wordsa new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.

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#144 · Gary Klein9 Aug 2022 · 1h 39m · 16 korrents

Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144

Gary Klein

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Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:06:46
Our reading
Organizations sincerely believe they want insights and still suppress them, because insights are disorganizing.
Their wordsWhat blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights and they want innovation and they really don't. But they're they're being serious. They think they want insights. But insights are disorganizing.
0:16:12
Our reading
Experts stay highly aware of their own mistakes, and the people who stall at competence are the ones who move on and forget theirs.
Their wordsSo, experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.
0:21:32
Our reading
A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.
Their wordsI may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
0:25:07
Our reading
A decision cannot be judged by its outcome, because good decisions fail through no fault of the decider and bad ones succeed by luck.
Their wordsNow, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn't work through no fault of the employee. And some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So, you can't just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what What was the person thinking about when they made the decision?
0:38:55
Our reading
Scientists use the same knowledge shields as everyone else, explaining away inconvenient data to hold on to their story.
Their wordsBut the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields, the way all of us do, that that a a a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies. But what we're effectively doing is we're holding on to our story.
0:40:47
Our reading
Fixation errors come from explaining away anomalies and holding on to a wrong first impression until it is far too late.
Their wordsSo we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.

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Marc Andreessen25 Jan 2022 · 1h 17m · 16 korrents

Inside the Mind of A Famous Investor | Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen

Our page for this episode →Watch on youtube.com ↗

Our reading — their words are on the recording

0:03:29
Our reading
Reading further back in history shows that what feels new and unique to the present era is usually a very old pattern.
Their wordsWhat what I find generally is if I don't understand something, I I try to read backwards and and and kind of the further back back I read, the more universal things I find. And the more things that I think are kind of remarkable and unique to our era actually turn out to be quite universal.
0:07:14
Our reading
Hostility to a new technology comes from people whose power rests on the old one, because the new technology reorders who holds status.
Their wordsAnd so all of the people who have achieved positions of power and authority in the world based on prior generations of technology are inherently threatened by new technology because new technology will upend the power and status structures and then a new set of people will, you know, come to the foreground and and take the power.
0:12:37
Our reading
The deepest political conflict of the internet era is between those using the network to reinforce top-down power and those using it to disrupt it.
Their wordswhat we have now is kind of at the at the sort of deepest level what we have is kind of this big fight between people who want to use the internet to basically reinforce top-down power uh, versus people who want to use it to disrupt top-down power.
0:17:05
Our reading
Open access to information makes a closed information regime on the Soviet model fundamentally impossible to sustain.
Their wordsit's like could you ever have another Soviet Union like in the era of the internet? Um you know North Korea's doing their damndest to try to maintain that model you know but without going full North Korea like I'm not sure you can. I I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible.
0:21:01
Our reading
A successful startup takes about five years to become an incumbent, and defending what it has built is the rational thing for it to do.
Their wordsA successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
startups
0:22:31
Our reading
The drift from attacking to defending is a temptation facing every incumbent rather than a fault of any particular company.
Their wordsI I would I would not say that about Google. I would just say that more generally like that is the incumbent temptation. Um it is is basically is basically go from attack mode to defend mode, right? Go from being the pirate to being the navy.

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