What I'm listening to - April 2025

Rolex on Acquired

Some good stories on the history of the brand. They initially sourced movements—the key mechanism that powers a watch—from a company called Aegler. They bought from Aegler on a handshake agreement lasting 99 years (!!!) before buying the supplier in 2004.

I also didn't realize their unique business model and position in the market. Other brands like Patek Philippe cost 30x as much but Rolex makes up 30% of the Swiss watch market. "It's an exceptionally well-made industrial product with exquisite engineering and amazing branding... probably the most optimally-positioned supply-demand curve company we’ve ever covered."

Steve Schlafman and Jonny Miller on AI and I

These were both great episodes about how to use AI to grow personally and professionally.

Steve is an exec coach and former VC interested in various modalities, including Hakomi Somatic Coaching, a mindfulness practice that uncovers subconscious patterns. Steve describes how he uses AI to help interpret his dreams through this lens. He also shares a pretty wild psilocybin journey where he uses ChatGPT to create a "fire ceremony" to help process his experience. The whole episode is worth a listen.

Jonny also had an interesting vibe focused heavily on meditation. My favorite part was how he created a "book of life" he calls the Codex Vitae. This includes his goals, challenges, and fears in a format that's easy to share with ChatGPT. It inspired me to spend more time capturing these details so that ChatGPT replies are more personalized and useful.

Snipd on Latent Space

Snipd is a great podcast app and one of the AI tools I love. Its key feature automatically saves insights ("snips") along with corresponding transcript snippets as you listen.

I like how they use AI to enhance other features like extracting mentions of books or podcast guests: "we identify the mentioned books...like 90% of the time it works perfectly out of the box, one shot, and every now and then it starts identifying books that were not really mentioned or starts to make up books... we have another LLM challenging it"

The founder also hints at adding video and audio book support. He's very focused on the "half a billion monthly active podcast listeners" who don't have a "trigger" to review or grapple with what they listened to.

The High Schooler Making $20M a Year on My First Million

This one will make you smile. Zach Yadegari is a total beast of a founder who started an AI-powered calorie tracking app in high school. Love his young person energy and exactly why I listen to My First Million.