Guest: David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO & co-owner of 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails 

37signals CTO David Heinemeier Hansson has organized his life around his passions: Writing, racing sports cars, and coding. “ Why aren't we all doing that?” he wonders. “Why aren't we all trying to optimize our life in such a way that much of it is enjoyable?”

Part of the problem, David argues, is that it’s impossible to find a creative or productive flow inside of mainstream work culture. Open offices, managerial over-hiring, and sloppy scheduling prevents people from reaching a flow state.

“40 hours a week is plenty than most people,” he says. “... So many people today are focused on just adding more and more hours. They're not thinking about how those hours are spent.” 

Chapters:

• (01:19) - 24 Hours of Le Mans
• (06:48) - Amateurs in sports car racing
• (10:54) - Flow and meditation
• (15:25) - Mundane bulls**t
• (18:14) - Optimizing for flow
• (21:09) - Calendars and open offices
• (24:30) - Full-time managers
• (29:06) - Small companies
• (32:20) - Selfishness and work
• (40:21) - Taking other people’s money
• (45:43) - Temptation
• (49:49) - Moderately rich
• (55:19) - “The day I became a millionaire”
• (58:56) - The hassle
• (01:03:58) - Achieving the dream
• (01:08:34) - Shopify and Tobias Lütke
• (01:14:50) - Trade-offs and downsides
• (01:18:43) - The impact of Ruby on Rails
• (01:22:02) - “I love being wrong”
• (01:25:37) - DEI and illegal drugs
• (01:29:49) - Not hiring
• (01:30:35) - What “grit” means to David

Mentioned in this episode: TikTok, Minecraft, Mario Kart, Formula One, NASCAR, Lewis Hamilton, the NBA, Tesla Model S, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Steve McQueen, Jason Fried, Tetris, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber, Elon Musk and Twitter, the Dunbar number, Zappos, Google, Adam Smith, Stripe, Meta, Jeff Bezos, Basecamp, Zapier, 1Password, GitHub, SpaceX, private jets, Aesop, the Pagani Zonda, the Porsche Boxster, Lamborghini, Coco Chanel, LeBron James, Hey, Steve Jobs, Michael Arrington and TechCrunch, Y Combinator, Dr. Thomas Sowell,Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn, Grit by Angela Duckworth, and LEGO. 

Links:

Connect with David

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Connect with Joubin

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• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

On this special episode of Grit, we look back at some of the coolest stories and best advice our guests have shared in 2024.

Chapters:

• (00:49) - David Risher on his Amazon easter egg & moving on
• (07:02) - Jason Kilar on bouncing between relevance & irrelevance
• (15:13) - Eoghan McCabe on "re-founding" the company he started
• (22:59) - Mark Fields on battling with Trump & running to the fire
• (29:41) - John Hanke on intensity and balance
• (38:00) - Rony Abovitz on whether losing he's bitter about losing Magic Leap to COVID
• (47:42) - Mark McLaughlin on sacrificing personal time
• (57:39) - Taylor Francis on building culture

#191 CEO & Co-Founder Intercom, Eoghan McCabe: Second Beginning
#209 Former President & CEO Ford, Mark Fields: All Cylinders
#203 CEO Niantic, John Hanke: Buried Ships
#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog
#202 Chairman of Qualcomm, Mark McLaughlin: The Right Pitch
#189 Co-Founder Watershed, Taylor Francis: Worthy Missions

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
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• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants

In 1992, Larry Baer was part of the ownership group that bought the San Francisco Giants and successfully prevented the team from being moved to Tampa, Florida. Back then, they had a big problem to solve: An old, uncomfortable ballpark that voters wanted to see replaced, but didn’t want to pay for.

20 years after the construction and financial success of Candlestick Park’s replacement, Oracle Park, Baer — now the CEO of the Giants — embarked on an even bigger project, developing an entire neighborhood near Oracle called Mission Rock. “We’re in the baseball business, but really, we're in the media, entertainment, sports, real estate business,” he says. 

Chapters:

• (01:05) - Growing up a fan
• (04:37) - Larry’s dad
• (07:28) - Stopping the move
• (13:28) - The Giants in 1992
• (15:18) - “What am I doing here?”
• (19:31) - Hiring with urgency
• (23:34) - Last out to first pitch
• (27:45) - Buster Posey
• (30:13) - The Candlestick problem
• (36:36) - Making a new stadium
• (43:00) - Always hungry
• (45:01) - Becoming CEO
• (49:52) - Homegrown talent
• (52:55) - The Mission Rock neighborhood
• (57:27) - Revitalizing San Francisco
• (01:03:20) - “It all starts here”
• (01:07:20) - What Oracle Park means
• (01:09:52) - What “grit” means to Larry

Mentioned in this episode: Barry Bonds, Candlestick Park, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Josh Harris, Larry and Bob Tisch, CBS, Peter Magowan and Safeway, Charles Schwab, Don Fisher, Bill Hewlett, Arthur Rock, Charles Johnson, Harmon Burns, Bank of America, Walter Shorenstein, Dianne Feinstein, Bob Lurie, Bobby Bonds, Dennis Gilbert, Roger Craig, Al Rosen, Dusty Baker, Bob Quinn, Brian Sabean, George Steinbrenner, Bob Lillis, Matt Williams, Greg Johnson, the 1994 baseball strike, Chase Manhattan Bank, Warren Hellman, Jimmy Lee, Pacific Bell, Coca-Cola Company, J.T. Snow, Jeff Kent, Bill Neukom, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Sergio Romo, Hunter Pence, Marco Scutaro, Joseph Lacob and the Golden State Warriors, Tishman Speyer, Al Kelly, Ryan McInerney, Visa, Che Fico, Arsicault, Trick Dog and Josh Harris, the Chase Center, Sam Altman and Open AI, Anthropic, Daniel Lurie, Salesforce and Dreamforce, Imagine Dragons, Pink, the Moscone Center, and Billy Crystal. 

Links:

Connect with Larry

• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Tony Vinciquerra, outgoing CEO of Sony Pictures

Tony Vinciquerra never planned to get into the entertainment business, let alone to become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. After seven years, he’s about to leave the CEO role at Sony Pictures (although he will stay on as chairman for one more year) and attributes much of his success to luck: “I’ve been in the right place at the right time a lot of times.” 

That said, he also encourages his children to proactively be curious, something that has served Tony well across his whole career. “I don’t have as deep an education as many of the people that [I] compete with,” he says. “So I try to make up for that by knowing what’s going on and being more curious ... working harder at it and being more — I don’t know what the right word is, but sucking more information in, all the time.”

Chapters:

• (00:54) - The perks of being a studio boss
• (03:38) - Hulu and Peter Chernin
• (06:41) - Fox Television
• (10:03) - Building relationships
• (13:37) - Not retiring
• (15:34) - Fixing Sony
• (23:29) - Intellectual property
• (26:58) - Juggling and baseball
• (29:30) - Setbacks and cable networks
• (34:58) - The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes
• (37:22) - AI and replacing writers
• (39:46) - Adapting to new tech
• (44:38) - Changing consumer behavior
• (49:25) - Sports media and live TV
• (55:31) - Bad days
• (58:57) - Tony’s family
• (01:02:47) - Looking back
• (01:05:04) - Proactive curiosity
• (01:07:33) - What “grit” means to Tony

Mentioned in this episode: Jason Kilar and Warner Bros., Jeff Zucker, John Waldron and Goldman Sachs, FX, Drayton McLane, Netflix, Variety, PlayStation, Spider-Man, Tom Rothman, CBS and Paramount, Comcast and NBC, Disney, Mike Hopkins, Amazon Prime, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Breaking Bad, The Last of Us, HBO, Uncharted, WBZ-TV, the Game Show Network, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, Joker: Folie à Deux, Miramax, Here, Tom Hanks, Venom: The Last Dance, Michael Ovitz, Sam Altman and OpenAI, Pixomondo, Neal Mohan and YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, DirecTV and AT&T, NFL Sunday Ticket, Qualcomm, the New York Knicks, the Golden State Warriors, Larry Baer and the San Francisco Giants, Major League Baseball, Walmart and Vizio, Madame Web, Capital Cities, Mark McLaughlin, and Mark Fields and Ford.

Links:

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer and chairman of Re:Build Manufacturing

Jeff Wilke worked more than 20 years at Amazon, overseeing the million-person team that speedily gets packages from warehouses to doorsteps. In hindsight, he observes that Amazon Prime’s exponential growth was actually an incremental daily process.

“I used to say things like, ‘If God was running this plant, whoever is your God ... they can’t violate physical laws. How well would they do?’ And then we know where we are,” Jeff says.

“If we’re perfect in it, compounding over all this time, we’re going to get there. But when you’re in the middle of it, it can feel almost impossible.” 

Chapters:

• (01:37) - Grit and longevity
• (02:24) - Flow state
• (07:29) - Refining mental models
• (12:29) - The ivory tower and the shop floor
• (16:49) - Gnarly holidays
• (20:41) - Identifying grit
• (24:28) - Reflecting and learning
• (27:36) - Christmas 2000
• (31:06) - The duplicate bug
• (34:01) - Incremental progress
• (38:36) - Prime Video
• (43:05) - Organizing the day
• (46:42) - Amazon’s leaders
• (49:55) - The Whole Foods acquisition
• (53:33) - Amazon Fashion
• (59:54) - The great Kindle battle
• (01:02:40) - How to work with Jeff Bezos
• (01:05:11) - Leaving Amazon
• (01:09:48) - Re:Build Manufacturing
• (01:14:35) - What “grit” means to Jeff

Mentioned in this episode: Peloton, Andy Jassy, Daniel Kahneman, Zoom, Allied Signal, Toyota and the Gemba Walk, MacKenzie Scott, Bob Thomas and Crucibles of Leadership, David Risher, Toys “R” Us, Amazon Prime, Jeff Blackburn, Louis Pasteur, Netflix, Bill Carr, Steve Kessel, Larry Bossidy, Rick Dalzell, West Point, John Mackey, Liesl Wilke, Tony Hsieh, the Met Gala, Anna Wintour, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tim Tebow, the New York Jets, Shopbob, Gucci, Zara, Cathy Beaudoin, Walmart, Dave Clark, John Doerr, Bill Baumol, and Bing Gordon.

Links:

Connect with Jeff

• Twitter

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Dan Streetman, CEO of Tanium

A graduate of West Point who served in Iraq combat operations, Tanium CEO Dan Streetman can’t help but compare his business career to his military experience. Understanding huge structures and processes is a crucial skill at both Tanium and in the Army, he says, as are the skills for aligning people around a shared mission.

“Before you go on an operation, you write a thing called an operations order ... [and] one of the most important things at the operations order is this paragraph called the commander's intent,” he explains, “which describes how you believe the mission is going to be accomplished and why it's important.”

“You may end up doing something completely different. But as long as you understand the mission and the commander's intent, the organization can do amazing things.”

Chapters:

• (01:05) - Election Day
• (02:44) - Ranger School
• (06:42) - Parenting and business school
• (09:59) - Military structures
• (12:27) - Serving in Iraq
• (15:59) - Back to normal life
• (21:37) - Working out
• (24:14) - Quality sleep
• (26:37) - Non-founder CEOs
• (31:35) - Getting the job
• (35:56) - Earning respect
• (38:49) - TIBCO
• (43:40) - Redline
• (46:37) - Going public
• (53:54) - Time horizons
• (58:35) - Free AI
• (01:03:11) - Whar “grit” mans to Dan
• (01:03:40) - Who Tanium is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Ronald Reagan, Terri Streetman, Ironman Triathlons, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Stanley McChrystal, Jon Abizaid, Charles Jacoby, Thomas Siebel and C3, Salesforce, Bill McDermott, Carl Eschenbach, Marc Benioff, Garmin, Mark McLaughlin, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, World Series of Poker, Amdocs, David and Orion Hindawi, Citrix, Harvard University, Pets.com, Ben Horowitz, Vista Equity Partners, Vivek Ranadivé, Robert Smith, Operation Warp Speed, BreakLine, Bipul Sinha and Rubrik, Mikhail Gorbachev, F. Scott Fitzgerald, OpenAI and ChatGPT, and Google.

Links:

Connect with Dan

• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy

When Josh Silverman joined the board of Etsy, he had one condition: “Don’t ask me to the be the CEO.” And technically, they didn’t ask. One day, he got a phone call informing him the board had elected him as the new CEO, just days before an earnings miss. He knew the odds were against him — layoffs would be necessary, and “I was going to have to be the villain” — but decided to say yes out of a sense of duty to Etsy’s users and workers. “If I can be helpful, I have a responsibility to do it,” Josh says.

Chapters:

• (00:55) - Energy management
• (02:42) - Meetings
• (09:56) - Etsy’s strategy
• (13:36) - Learning to delegate
• (17:10) - Setting an example
• (24:17) - Evite’s rise and fall
• (27:46) - Self vs. company
• (30:22) - Legacy
• (34:21) - Control and agency
• (37:44) - Joining Etsy’s board
• (40:40) - Becoming CEO
• (46:16) - Culture shock
• (48:09) - “We need you, trust us”
• (51:25) - eBay and Skype
• (57:15) - Pushed out
• (01:00:40) - Accountability and family
• (01:03:53) - Time horizons
• (01:05:55) - Gen AI-supported art
• (01:08:29) - Who Etsy is hiring and what “grit” means to Josh

Mentioned in this episode: Ken Chenault and American Express, Nick Daniel, Rachana Kumar, Ticketmaster and IAC, Etsy Studios, Silverlake, Shopping.com, Google, Microsoft, and Austin City Limits. 

Links:

Connect with Josh

• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“A lot of people are really bad at knowing what good is,” says Codeium CEO Varun Mohan. Specifically, he’s thinking of startups that hire based on a “logo” — a well-known company on the résumé — rather than exceptional talent. Codeium is based in Mountain View, CA, and Varun believes that it’s incumbent on any new startup to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area, because of how exceptional talent is concentrated there. 

“When you hire someone that’s 10x better,” he says, “you can’t replace them with 10 1x people. Because the the 10x person is going to be thinking of ideas that none of these 1x people are ever going to think of.”

Chapters:

• (01:05) - Ludicrous growth
• (03:54) - Seizing opportunity
• (07:29) - Product-market fit
• (13:05) - Scale AI & MIT
• (17:42) - Coding efficiency
• (22:58) - Larger companies
• (25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship
• (29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium
• (34:00) - Giving away the product
• (37:01) - The code-gen landscape
• (42:20) - Annual reinvention
• (45:00) - Picking a problem
• (47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help
• (50:43) - Ambition
• (53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley
• (55:11) - Spotting talent
• (59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring
• (59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun

Mentioned in this episode: Graham Moreno, Wiz, ChatGPT, Google, Nuro, Goldman Sachs, Waymo, the DARPA Challenge, Alex Wang, Douglas Chen, Safeway, Equinox, Carlos Delatorre and MongoDB, The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, Exafunction, Mamoon Hamid, Figma, JPMorgan Chase, Starlink, SpaceX, Rubrik, Michael Dell, Stripe, and John Doerr.

Links:

Connect with Varun

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connect with Leigh Marie

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy

AI is poised to change nearly every business, but few are changing as quickly as education. And Sal Khan, who has spend more than a decade manually creating more than 7,000 educational videos, says that’s a good thing. He’s encouraged Khan Academy to focus on “disrupt[ing] ourselves ... more than almost any other organization that I know of.” 

The reason is backed up by the data: Personalized tutors — designed to help students achieve mastery in a subject, but previously thought to be unscalable — could shift the educational bell curve “significantly to the right,” Sal says.

Chapters:

• (00:52) - John and Ann Doerr
• (05:20) - Khan Academy’s origins
• (07:42) - What it is now
• (12:43) - Emotional fortitude
• (15:25) - Generating revenue
• (19:36) - The two-sigma “problem”
• (21:31) - OpenAI and Sam Altman
• (24:47) - What AI can do
• (27:56) - Cheating and other fears
• (30:06) - Video production
• (34:08) - Standardized tests
• (38:36) - AI tutors’ tone
• (40:22) - Not leaving the closet
• (43:20) - Who Khan Academy is hiring
• (45:58) - What “grit” means to Sal

Mentioned in this episode: Nasdaq, Dan Wohl, Vedic and Buddhist literature, Microsoft, Benjamin Bloom, ChatGPT, the Turing Test, Greg Brockman, Donald Trump, Bing Chat and Sydney, Khanmigo, the SAT and ACT, Schoolhouse.world, Craig Silverstein and Google, John Resig and jQuery, and Angela Duckworth.

Links:

Connect with Sal

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• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling

One of the most important things a non-founder can do, says Rippling COO Matt MacInnis, is to learn how to operate in the context of the company they’re joining. His CEO, Parker Conrad, “spikes” in certain skill areas, and the rest of the executive team needs to maximize his ability to thrive while “taking care of the rest of it.” Matt likened the work to being a hobbyist airplane pilot, who can’t get a license without knowing all the minute details about their plane’s engine and aerodynamics. 

“You can’t be a good pilot if you don’t understand the engine, because if something goes wrong, you want to be able to troubleshoot it,” he says. “An executive coming in to fly your airplane better learn the engine.”

Chapters:

• (01:08) - Telling Rippling’s story
• (04:27) - Founding & failing at Inkling
• (09:30) - Different types of hard
• (13:55) - Discipline and stamina
• (15:22) - Meeting with Steve Jobs
• (19:20) - Definitely, give up!
• (22:29) - Product-market fit
• (27:15) - Founders and culture
• (33:24) - Executive instincts
• (36:06) - Talent Signal and AI
• (40:06) - 150 former founders
• (44:08) - Zero to one projects
• (48:06) - The failure of Silicon Valley Bank
• (55:25) - Routines and discipline
• (59:37) - Disagreeing with Parker
• (01:02:25) - Who Rippling is hiring
• (01:03:37) - What “grit” means to Matt

Mentioned in this episode: Parker Conrad, London Breed, Apple, Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Tenaya Capital, digital textbooks on iPad, Oricom, Netscape, Peter Cho, Eddy Cue, John Couch, iBooks, Slack, Airbnb, Paul Graham, Brian Chesky, “founder mode,” Larry Ellison, Ivan Zhao and Notion, Intel and ARM, Salesforce, United Airlines, LLMs, GitHub, DocuCharm, Peter Thiel, Mamoon Hamid, Expensify, Navan, Costco, Comcast, HBO’s Silicon Valley, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA, and Taylor Swift.

Links:

Connect with Matt

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Jason Kilar, former CEO & co-founder of Hulu and former CEO of WarnerMedia

When Jason Kilar was a child, he was obsessed with Walt Disney — not just as a filmmaker or the creator of Disneyland, but as an entrepreneur. He started his career at the Walt Disney Company (where else?) but then got his first opportunity to help build something new when a young startup entrepreneur from Seattle visited his business school classroom. Most of Jason’s classmates predicted the failure of this startup, Amazon.com, which elicited “this awesome laugh, the Jeff Bezos trademark laugh.” How a leader reacts to criticism or doubts, Jason learned, says a lot about their conviction and intelligence.

Chapters:

• (01:08) - Bing Gordon and John Doerr
• (04:11) - Warner Bros.
• (06:12) - Walt Disney
• (11:10) - Working at Disney
• (14:32) - What makes it special
• (18:31) - Meeting your heroes
• (20:06) - “Walt’s folly,” Disneyland
• (22:45) - Harvard and Amazon
• (25:09) - Meeting Jeff Bezos
• (29:10) - “Help people understand Amazon exists”
• (33:25) - Amazon’s culture
• (38:07) - What Warner Bros. makes
• (40:55) - Obscurity and relevance
• (45:53) - Feeling the lows
• (50:09) - Launching Hulu
• (53:36) - NewCo or ClownCo?
• (59:13) - Over-communication
• (01:03:14) - The future of TV memo
• (01:06:46) - Innovator’s dilemma
• (01:08:57) - No labels
• (01:14:04) - Unfinished business
• (01:16:22) - Staying present
• (01:20:26) - The theatrical window
• (01:26:19) - What’s next?

Mentioned in this episode: Amazon, The Matrix, Star Wars: A New Hope, Disney World, Diane Disney Miller, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Michael Eisner, Universal Studios and Harry Potter, Disney University, Jeffrey Rayport, Barnes & Noble, Joel Spiegel, David Risher, Joy Covey, Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury, Andy Jassy, Brian Birtwistle, Jim Kingsbury, Vessel and Verizon, HBO, Friends, Hogwarts Legacy, Sony, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount, AT&T, Discovery, Richard Tom, Kara Swisher, Fox, YouTube and Google, Saturday Night Live, Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker, Bob Iger, Andy Rachleff and Benchmark, CBS, Miracle on 34th Street, Marissa Mayer and Yahoo, Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap, House of the Dragon and Industry, Dune, Christopher Nolan, and the TSA.

Links:

Connect with Jason

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• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected] 

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm