Divinations Podcast #002 - Discussing “Dominance Friction” with Dan Shipper

The Divinations Podcast is back!

(If you want to add it to your podcast app, press “add to podcast app” by the audio player above!)

This week, Dan Shipper and I discuss our interview with Jesse Beyroutey, and dive deeper into the idea of “Dominance Friction.”

Here’s a rough outline:

• In the first 8 minutes we introduce Dan and his relationship with Jesse
• From minute 8–11 we introduce the general concept of Dominance Friction
• From minute 11–20 we use the example of Transfer Wise to illustrate the principle of customer alignment. (It’s a really fascinating example that wasn’t in the original post, but will be written up in a forthcoming post for paid subscribers. Jesse invested in their seed round and now they are a billion dollar business, all because they had better alignment with customers than the incumbent banking industry.)
• After minute 20 is my favorite part. We add some additional nuance to the idea of incentive alignment. We talk about Lambda School, General Assembly, Substack, Medium, Casper, Vanguard, etc. We talk about the limits of incentive alignment, and Dan comes up with an awesome metaphor, how incentives are like the climate and individual decisions are like the daily weather. I talk about how the problems with incentive alignment alone are pretty similar to problems with democracy and capitalism, and we get into a conversation about Leo Strauss. It gets deep, folks :)

Anyway — I hope you love this discussion, we had a ton of fun with it!