Category: Podcasts

Podcast notes – Kyle Samani (Multicoin) on what’s next for NFTs (w/ Frank Chaparro)

Host Frank Chaparro – The Block
Guest Kyle Samani – Multicoin Capital

Hedge fund founded in 2017
Funded Solana, FTX, Helium

How he survived through 17-18 bear
Founders worked hard, he supports them
Parents were immigrants – taught him persistence & grit

NFTs don’t have pieces of state with relationships with each other (yet)
eg, Bored Apes are individually isolated
Designing relationships between NFTs, and letting them evolve over time

Beeple’s 5000 Days should be 5000 separate NFTs that are related to each other, have games to collect and combine them

Recombining NFTs into social games

Fan clubs – Bieber’s new song, letting first 1000 listen to it early

Where they’re investing?
3 layers to NFT stack:
1. Primitive / infrastructure – eg, Arweave (storage), Render (distributed graphics rendering), Metaplex (Uniswap of NFTs on Solana)
2. Exchanges – Hakku (NFT exchange on Polygon), invested in at least 3 now
3. Buying NFTs directly – invested in Loot, but will be small (less than 1% of assets), hard to do this at scale

NFT exchanges will segment – doesn’t make sense that apes are traded in same way as .eth names as metaverse land, there will be many exchanges, they’ll vertical-ize

How are valuations justified?
Just assume every musician will issue a 10K NFT collection – why can’t that be sustained? Most of them have several Ks of fans and some have much more
People underestimate scale the internet brings, TAMs have gotten way way way bigger

Web3 will be less disruptive to society than web2
Web3 = Permissionless flow of value (web2 = permissionless flow of information)
Who will win? Majority will be net new protocols and businesses (not web2 / traditional industries)

NFTs = let superfans self identify and spend
Patronage models for creativity will evolve

Power law distribution happens everywhere, will also happen in NFTs / web3

Multicoin’s alpha is identifying new theses, what new tech enables

Growth in users, revenues, have really accelerated
Why? They all have smartphones, they all have internet, they’re all comfortable (now) spending money online

New inventions will be made regardless of what happens in global macro

Is there froth in venture?
It does feel frothy, easier to be crypto VC bc time to liquidity is shorter
Absolute $ in crypto VC is still much smaller than trad VC
Valuations won’t come down for high quality teams

Once product market fit established, rate of growth / adoption will be faster than ever – viral and reflexive nature in crypto is extraordinary and still deeply under appreciated

How many investments so far in 2022?
5-10 investments
Deploying capital as fast as ever

Doesn’t know or care bitcoin price, really avoids checking crypto prices

Park City, Utah is now his home base
Loves snowboarding

Public pension funds are buying top layer 1s – that’s the bid – not just btc / eth

Most investors no longer have regulatory risk as the main reason not to invest

Many investors in 2010, 2011 were skeptical of internet / software, now everyone sees that power and transformation. What’s next? A lot are looking at crypto as one of the future’s big platforms

What investments is he looking for?
Metaverse (infrastructure, defi broadly, Graph, Render, Fluid) – prefers those that are working on credibly neutral
Social media – soon something social will break out that will be crypto native

True crypto natives today – closer to 1M than 10M
Large enough to bootstrap meaningful social network
In 24 months, these users will move off Twitter onto something crypto native

Podcast notes – Daniel Gross (Pioneer) on identifying 10x talent (Auren Hoffman’s podcast)

Guest Daniel Gross, runs Pioneer accelerator
Host Auren Hoffman

If you invest in 16 yos – who is underpriced? How to identify talent?
Simplest thing is raw energy – it’s hard to measure, but everyone knows how it feels
PG: Formidability and almost fear

Studies on Professor charisma – can tell after 2 minutes if a professor is charismatic

Every culture has energetic versus non-energetic types

IQ matters, need working memory, reason through complex problems, but there’s a asymptote rather quickly
Warren Buffett: Emotional stability is just as important (if not more)

For founding companies, initial hypothesis is generally wrong – how many things will you try, how quickly will you try them?
Energetic founders have more shots on goal

When you meet someone, would you work for them?

Is the person funny? Humor is underrated. Charismatic leaders are pretty funny
Humor creates bonding
like Peloton coaches telling jokes, building bonds with you through a screen

Don’t hire for lateral moves
True gratitude is powerful, try to lift people up

Ambition is more nurture
Who is that person performing for? Who are they trying to impress? Who are their role models?
Bezos even with all his success, is still competing with Elon

A lot of people perform for Twitter

Can we make people more energetic?
Dark Ages, we moved from alehouses > tea and coffee houses
Real miracle for human productivity

Humans have huge dynamic range, how much will you activate?
Meeting impressive people is a real motivator / energy boost

How to create more optimism in society
Number of native Chinese Nobel Laureates – only six or seven in such a huge nation
Lack of optimism
Very domestically competitive, leads to local optimization over global optimization

Israel has no market risk companies, only execution risk companies
No Snapchat, but they’ll will get semiconductors right
Related to harsh society, existential risks

What’s biggest motivator for founders?
Silicon Valley was not driven by commercial goals initially
A Walt Disney sense of building a cool place
Changed today by 1) crypto (instant liquidity) and 2) growing popularity (Eternal September effect)

As Silicon Valley eats more of the world, tech as a sector doesn’t really exist, it’s just business

Most founders now are just on easier / known paths, eg, SaaS companies

Brain is better at imagining downside over upside
Upside requires real creativity
CNN is a menu of moral panics
Some of it is useful, but only small % you have agency over
Daniel only reads Financial Times and Bloomberg – and you have agency over more of the news items, you can trade on it / react to it

Covid – unvaccinated people – no news item or celebrity endorsement will lead them to get vaccinated now

He likes to ask simple interview questions, like your favorite movies
Tyler Cowen does this
Get honest answers, get same alpha by decoding these responses
Can have a better conversation too
He likes the movie Whiplash – can filter the insecure overachiever types
It’s like a dating problem

Likes to go meta in interviews
Start an interview by talking about how most interviews are boring, maybe we’ll go on a random walk, have a fun 30 minutes together

Auren’s own experience: best hires not really related to best interviews
10x-ers – don’t think he could have predicted it at the interview stage

Prefers raw 23yo, energetic, higher beta
Doesn’t like the extremely polished execs, feels like he’s in a punching match

How do you test for aesthetic in an engineer?
Good writing can be a decent proxy

How to quantify engineering productivity
Often must choose between dirty metric that’s easy to explain, and a better metric that’s more complicated to understand
Dirty metric is usually the right choice

Auren: Successful salesperson – extremely high correlation with working hours
Almost the only metric in sales
In engineers, some of his best ones work <40 hours a week

Daniel’s best engineer left work every day at 3:59pm, but would have seen his productivity in lines of code. Spent 30 minutes planning in the morning, and then just output rest of the day
Code that works the first time is another good predictor of skill, versus it doesn’t work and let’s brute force / debug it

10x-er – what they consider easy work is often what others think is hard work – baseline sense is very different from others
Expand job description, do a lot more than expected
They just have a sense of what’s right, what needs to be done
Conscientiousness overdose

How can companies use leaderboards
Staring at charts together as a team is helpful, especially in remote work world
If you have a fixed beginning and end for reviewing stats – eg, 2 hours every week – creates more engagement
Liveliness also helps – constant up and down ticks eg stock market
Need skin in the game – real risk tied to the metrics

Remote work has shortage of emotion, oxytocin

Lots of reputational short sellers these days – looking to bring down others
eg, Slack emoji riots, cancel culture, reputation raiders

Grew up in Jerusalem, orthodox Judaism
What he learned – outsiders are very beneficial for innovation, talent is universal

Advice to younger self
Only moving at 5% of potential speed – do everything faster – how to get to 100% or even 105%
Benefitted at Apple from coworkers, especially when young, being an apprentice
Finding mentors sooner, increases compounding growth rate

Podcast notes – Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Graveyard Book) and Tim Ferriss

Guest: Neil Gaiman
Wrote American Gods, Neverwhere, Sandman, Graveyard Book
Won Hugo and Nebula and many more
Narrates many of his own books
Currently showrunner for Good Omens, a BBC show
Professor @ Bard College

Tim’s chased this interview for a decade

Neil – at 15yo, started a magazine as a way to meet his favorite writers
Interviewed Roger Dean, designer and artist, famous for album covers – but the recorded audio messed up, so he’s always carried spares now

Ian Fleming didn’t enjoy process of writing James Bond books
So he would check into a strange hotel in a strange place for 2 weeks, nothing else to do except write
Ian also gave Roald Dahl some of his best story twists
Neil sometimes does this hotel thing – wrote in a Marriott in World Trade Center, just wanted to finish and get out

Biggest rule he tells himself – you can sit there and you’re allowed to do absolutely nothing, but if you do something, you must write

Has a 3yo son – more fun to play with him than write

Often does first draft in fountain pen – likes to fill the ink, likes the heft, can see progress more clearly
“Emphasizes that no one’s meant to read your first draft”
First draft is you telling story to yourself
Second draft is typing into a computer – making it look like he knew what he was doing all along

Computer expands a story like gas – the stories tend to get longer, but there isn’t a lot more story there (than writing by hand)
Doesn’t want his story to become gaseous and thin

Likes Leuchtturm1917 notebooks for writing

Has a house in Wisconsin

Anything you do can be fixed – but you can’t fix a blank page

What fountain pens he recs
-Go to NY fountain pen hospital – try them out
-Likes Lamy pens
-Signed ~1.5M signatures with a Pilot 823

Most of his early career, he wrote with an electric typewriter
After 10 years, he wanted antiquated rhythms while writing Stardust, so he decided to try hand writing / dip pens. You need to slow up, think ahead, write complete sentences

How to remove performance anxiety / pressure
Neil likes writing things no one’s waiting for
Wrote Coraline after American Gods – no one was expecting a children’s book – editors told him it was unpublishable
Wrote 5 or 6 lines a night, right before bed

Used to write multiple projects at once – if he got stuck on one, would rotate to another – but feels like he’s not as good at doing that anymore, takes too long to switch between projects

When he started (22-27ish), was a late night writer – nothing happened until kids in bed, 9pm until 2am, smoked, drank coffee
Later switched from coffee to tea, and began to fall asleep earlier
Writing novels works best when you can have the same day over and over again – like Groundhog Day
His example routine while staying at a friend’s lake house – wake up, go for a jog, go to a cafe, cup of green tea, sit in a corner and just start writing – and after a few months, had “Ocean at the end of the lane”

Tim’s favorite fiction audiobook is Graveyard Book
Where did that book come from?
25yo (1984 or so), living in Sussex, an old tall house his dad owned, had a 3yo son who loved his tricycle, they’d go across road to a churchyard
Saw how happy his son was riding his trike in that graveyard
Kinda like Jungle Book – kid in the graveyard being raised by dead people
It didn’t quite work – there was a demon, the character was very like his son – felt like the story was too good but his writing wasn’t there yet
He put it off for a decade, but knew it had legs
Over years, just let the story accumulate
After finishing Anansi Boys, decided to tackle it again
This time he didn’t start writing from beginning, but from the middle instead – Headstone (Ch4) – read it to his daughter Maddy, who wanted to know what happens next, so he kept writing, and eventually got it
“there was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife”

Friendship w/ Terry Pratchett
English writer who died in 2015, humorist and satirist, Discworld series, bestselling UK novelist
Met at an Italian restaurant, was a young journalist, Terry was a press officer at the time, “had same kind of mind”
Terry would send his drafts, get feedback on what’s funnier
Neil sent a draft to Terry of a project (Good Omens), Terry wanted to buy it or write it together, was wonderful apprenticeship for Neil
Finally turned into a TV show – Neil is showrunner, making the show was one of Terry’s last wishes
Cast Jon Hamm, David Tennant, Michael Sheen, etc
“giant interwoven panoply of mixed emotions”

What did he learn from Terry?
Willingness to go forward w/o knowing what happens next
George RR Martin divides writers into architects and gardeners – Neil would rather be a gardener, allow for accidents and surprises
Wanted to make Terry laugh
Terry had a form of Alzheimers, made documentaries about Alzheimers, supported assisted suicide / right to die

Podcast notes – All In on Russia-Ukraine war – Sacks, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

David Sacks – DS
Jason Calacanis – JC
Chamath – CP
David Friedberg – DF

DS:
Putin thought it would be a cakewalk, but resistance has been fierce. Amazing leadership, Western support
Dangerous crossroads, so much variance in outcomes
Lindsay Graham called for Putin’s ouster / assassination
NATO decided against imposing no-fly zone over Ukraine – effectively going to war
Advocating for not getting US more involved

DF:
Concerned not about US but its NATO allies getting involved, and then Article 5 collective defense obligates US to get involved
Franz Ferdinand moment
Nuclear reactor is like a temple on earth to God, different level of risk / extinction

DS:
Nuclear power plant attack may be mis-reporting by mainstream media
Confirmed no radiation, no explosion – there’s a lot of disinformation, pulling us into war

JC:
Crazy behavior by Russian troops, Putin to even seize the power plant

CP:
Adversity makes for strange bedfellows
Zelensky is truly patriotic
World is learning a different kind of warfare
We’re at economic war with Russia
We’re willing to put economic collateral at risk to win
Lots of global and American companies are pulling out, restricting Russia

DF:
Are we rushing into war without an exit strategy?
Lukoil was worth $60B and now worth zero, 65% of shares are held by American funds and investors

CP:
That’s a red herring
It’s not that much equity value – it’s not trillions of dollars

DF:
What about intermediaries / supply chain defaults and failures?
Russia + Ukraine = 25% of global wheat exports = lots of consumers depend on it

JC:
It’s tragic, but we need to create pain and suffering so Putin will change

DF:
Have we really done the calculus?
Economic war in short period of time – what are the consequences? How do we feed those dependent on the wheat supply?

CP:
We’re teetering towards recession
When energy prices spike 50%, we always enter recession
Government will need to be more accommodating
We’ll find a way to subsidize lower commodity prices – but will drive debt + deficits
Biden added new sanctions today to Russian crude

DS:
We’re on escalatory path here
Germans giving Ukraine missiles
We’re not in war yet, not a binary thinker
During Cold War, containment was to prevent communism, but simultaneously we wouldn’t challenge those countries that were already communist
Biden and Putin remember the Cold War
Biden re-iterated during SOTU that we wouldn’t get militarily involved
No matter what Biden does, Republicans and Fox will denounce him for weakness
What’s the end game? Our domestic dynamic and social media and cable news pushes us into escalation and WW3
Who are the grown ups?

CP:
Economic sanctions will continue to ratchet up
Only end game is regime change, Putin is only left with detente / retreat
Options now:
-Ukraine defends itself
-Russia wins
-Peace treaty, keep at current lines
Germany undid 40 years of policy, now re-arming plus investing in domestic energy

JC:
It’s terrifying for Europe as this threat is so close by, like Central America for us
Feels like no exit, Putin has pride + nuclear weapons

DS:
Russia said redline, no way Georgia / Ukraine joining NATO
Russia thinking: we’re about to have pro Western ruler in Ukraine, we’ll lose our main naval base by Black Sea and replaced by NATO base – not going to happen
Russia been saying this since 2008
Even if it’s a pretext, it still would have been good to explicitly take NATO expansion off the table
George HW Bush – great foreign policy president – thought Cheney / Rumsfeld didn’t listen, too aggressive, iron ass diplomacy

JC:
Has Putin overplayed his hand?

DF:
Putin can only keep plowing forward

CP:
Half Russia economy is exports, $500B-1T
World banks can print that money to compensate

JC:
Great decoupling is upon us

CP:
Historically economic sanctions aren’t enough, eventually get pulled into military battle
One real asset that is global and universal is financial payments infra
You can cripple a country / entity when you blacklist them from this infra
We haven’t explored this in full until now
Especially in airlines + oil

JC:
Take away your seat at the table
Netflix, Google, Apple pulling out
Russians turning off other internet services

CP:
Japan, Europe, Canada, America can support $5-7T in subsidies, shut off Russian exports for 5-10 years

DS:
What are our objectives?
Don’t think regime change is necessary – it’s cringe
US has not successfully done regime change
Goal should be ceasefire
Putin miscalculated resolve of Zelensky + the West

JC:
Putin lost info war
First meme war

CP:
Russian GDP has decayed 35% in last decade, it’s contracting

Paused listening about 3/5 of way through

Podcast notes – Rebel Wisdom – The State of Sensemaking

Sensemaking = understanding as a process of what’s going on in the world
Cognitive flexibility + emotional reality

Most peoples’ reality is narrowing until they can’t get out of it
Need to zoom out and zoom in appropriately

We’re in a post truth world with a huge amount of complexity

The Jordan Peterson (JP) phenomenon – why did it happen?
Produced “Glitch in the matrix” documentary

Redemptive power of truth
It burns off deadwood
How much of yourself is based on deception and lies?

Spirituality = removal of that which is false

Lot of shadows in progressive space
eg, yoga teachers becoming Qanon supporters
Shadow = aspects that are unexpressed, hidden, unconscious

Brexit + Trump = tribalism that wouldn’t acknowledge its tribalism

JP exposed this truth, the need for traditional values
“broke a conversational seal”
last gasp of the heroic individual
its necessary but not sufficient

Intersectional woke view can be weaponized – cancel culture

Consensus -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
Don’t get stuck in antithesis, the sense of certainty and lack of evolution

Tension between individual and collective
How to simultaneously be both
There’s a lot of Ayn Rand-ian fear of collectivism

Intellectual dark web was an organic alternative sensemaking mechanism

Media is still captured by narrow kind of progressivism
Becoming less and less relevant
Intellectuals are building independent brands eg Bari Weiss + Substack

Eric Weinstein – Consensus is usually achieved through combo of incentives + disincentives

JP: it’s a theological problem, we have to change who we are
Sam Harris – mainstream practices around presence, inner growth, meditation

Problem isn’t capitalism itself – good capitalism and free market are wonderful – it’s a type of exploitative behavior enabled by our modern economy

philosopher Ken Wilber – integral spirituality
the integral movement failed because people mistook the map for reality

tolerating complexity is a core skill today
hold multiple perspectives without obsessing over just one of them
meditation, reflection, these practices all help

John Vervaeke (JV) – colleague of JP’s
Meaning Crisis lecture series – crisis of meaning, there’s a void, we don’t know why we’re here, see it in identity politics, political tribes, replacing religion with politics
An emphasis on practice – Buddhism, tai chi, mindfulness
JV says “JP was a doorway but not a way”
JV says JP’s popularity comes from talking about same meaning crisis, role of myth + ritual + psychedelics
Differences: JP is Jungian, JV framework is cogsci
Be aware of cognitive traps and biases
4 types of knowledge – propositional, procedural (how to do something), participatory (immersion with world), perspectival (knowing what its like to be drunk)

If we want people to make sense of world well, can’t do it quickly, over simplified, in a distracted manner

Religious fervor around free speech especially online
Ivermectin is clearly a cult

In the future, everything will be a religion for 15 minutes

Durkheim – society always has sacred and profane and it runs through everything
eg, Constitution is sacred and OnlyFans is profane
Happening especially online

So much of what we’re seeing can’t be explained solely rationally
Recognize we’re not just rational actors
We make decisions emotionally and then post-rationalize them

Storming the capital – Qanon shaman in the capital building – heralding return of the irrational
This sort of thing will keep happening
Fascism, communism, all these bad answers with proven failures are now coming back
Qanon is perfect American religion – lots of paranoia among Americans – death of JFK, RFK, MLK – hamstrung by conspiracy theories – in a world of religion, of angels and demons – incredibly powerful story, you’re manipulated and led towards specific answers

Reintroduction of psychedelics into mainstream, shift of mainstream acceptance
Potential to transform cognition, sense of meaning and connection
Anything that meets the market (capitalism, modern economy) gets twisted and often leads further from truth

Conversation today is too focused on censorship versus free speech binary
Should focus instead on what are our responsibilities