I’ve written previously about how much I enjoy the Rich/Paul combination of the Postlight Podcast and highlighted some of my favorite excerpts. Now I have more.

Given that Postlight was acquired, I’m unsure of the podcast’s future and whether there will be a “Part III” to this series. So I’m taking this moment to document the gems we’ve been bequeathed up to now.

Ep. 268

[Rich]: [an “AI engine”] is just regular expressions.

[Paul]: If you want to charge more for statistics, just call it machine learning.

Ep. 270

[Rich]: People who are enamored with technology and just love the magic of tech have to be very, very careful because the real decision makers don’t give a shit.

[Paul]: They really don’t and that’s not bad. That’s just what’s up.

Ep. 279

[Paul]: There are so many people who just want to take your money and will give you a dashboard in return.

Ep. 280

Rich commenting on the eerily-similar character attributes he notices between cult leaders in Netflix documentaries and Silicon Valley startup leaders:

[Rich]: If [a cult leader] was interested in mobile apps, they would [be] a billionaire.

Ep. 289

[Paul]: Ultra high net worth individuals or extremely powerful individuals are unbelievably good at taking your time and really not giving you a lot in return.

[Paul]: [Rich people are] not going to give you $2 million because you had a fun idea. [Or if they are] they’re going to take 35% of your company.

[Rich]: Don’t seek [rich people’s] love. They died after the first $200 million. They just died. And then they kept building houses and yachts.

Ep. 291

[Paul]: You’re always one project away from happiness.

Ep. 296

[Corey Quinn]: The theory of cloud computing is that you only pay for what you use; in practice you pay for what you forget to turn off.

Ep. 308

[Paul]: Are our employees happy and motivated to stay?…the office is an attractive, good place to be, where it's easy to get work done. It’s a warm environment. Good coffee. Not super spoiled, there’s no ball pit or anything.

Ep. 316

[Guest]: DAOs are essentially subreddits with bank accounts and governance, right?

[Paul]: That sounds like a great way to build a society.

Ep. 318

[Paul]: You know why leaders love data? Because it’s not their decision.

Ep. 327

[Paul]: people do need to get close enough to [crypto, NFTs, etc.], but I just don’t buy any of it. I want them to all go invest in Vanguard fund and just get incremental returns on the S&P 500 as opposed to messing around with magical monkey pictures.

Ep. 330

[Paul]: The difference between billionaires and everybody else is that when billionaires think about dying, they’re pretty sure they should do something about it…[They think] “I have created value for a tremendous number of shareholders. And now I’m looking at mortality. Nobody expected for financial transactions to cost pennies and be able to talk across multiple bank systems. So maybe [I] should be looking at cellular degeneration.”

[Paul]: Musk is talking about all this unlocked, untouched value, right? My instinct is…Twitter is essentially a war of attrition. It’s World War I trench warfare as a social media company. Yeah, you might be able to move one or two inches in one way or the other, but everybody dies.