Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Younis: Founders should read old books instead of new releases

Qasar Younis · The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis · Mar 8, 2026 · at 59:12

Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis explains his mental model for reading and why time-tested books provide higher signal for leaders.

0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Especially my ethos of reading is read old books. Don't read anything new. Read, read old books because time has filtered out a lot of the noise. So you get a lot of signal and in your life, you, you're going to a thousand books. Maybe you'll read like in the best case scenario, you're going to read probably 50 to a hundred books, which is kind of crazy for the average person. So you're not going to read many. So don't read low quality content you read.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Qasar Younis

Opinion
Younis: Huawei is an extension of the Chinese state, not profit-driven
“Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders. It's a private company. It's really an extension of the state.”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 34:06 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Opinion
Younis: Chinese EV makers appear superior only because they disregard profits
“So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits. And because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The othe…”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 36:45 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Younis: Applied Intuition has never spent any raised venture capital
“Our claim to fame, which is kind of a crazy, you know, reality is we've never spent any money we've ever raised, you know, in the history of the company, which is kind of, it almost sounds like it's made up. It says that the company is almost 10 years old, you…”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 57:06 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Younis: Unassisted driving will be viewed like child labor in 30 years
“And I do believe in 20 or 30 years, not that much longer, we'll look back and we'll kind of be like, it's kind of like we think about child labor, you know, in a post-industrial revolution, that was a normal thing. You would send kids who are in middle school …”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 17:04 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Younis: Earliest robotics will upgrade existing hardware like cars and mining vehicles
“I think like the most obvious use cases that will come early are going to be use cases where you get the most amount of bang for buck. And the bang for buck is a car that drives itself or a mining robot, which is a mining vehicle, which is now intelligent. And…”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 23:02 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Younis: Every car company is developing a Tesla FSD rival
“I think generally speaking, every, every single car company on the planet right now is working on a product. That's like a Tesla FSD product. Every single car company there without exception.”
Qasar Younis Mar 8, 2026 ▶ 24:14 The real AI revolution isn’t software. It’s farms, mines, and trucks. | Qasar Younis
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.