Podcasts – Page 2

Podcast notes – Frax with Sam Kazemian – Blockcrunch: “Frax wants to be the Central Bank of the digital economy”

Frax milestones in 2022
-only large stablecoin that didn’t break peg (other than DAI)
-launched Frax Ether – an ETH-pegged stablecoin and liquid staking derivative

Products
-Frax stablecoin (Frax USD) has ~$1B TVL
-FPI – CPI pegged stablecoin
-Frax ETH – ETH pegged stablecoin
-Considering a BTC pegged stablecoin

Only 8 employees at Frax, all engineers (!)
Focused only on building stablecoins

Use Curve and FraxSwap for liquidity

Increasing Frax USD collateral ratio to 100% (currently 90%, 10% is FXS) – still more capital efficient than Maker (130+% collateral)

Believes it’s impossible to have a USD pegged stablecoin at scale ($1B+ TVL) without having at least one single real world asset

No one has solved the stablecoin trilemma

Central Banks don’t lend directly to Apple, Tesla – they create money, give it to commercial banks – and the banks lend it
Frax isn’t a commercial bank – “it wants to be the Central Bank of DeFi, the digital economy”

On-chain, closest thing to risk-free asset is USDC – “call a spade a spade”
Blackrock manages all USDC treasury assets, in money market fund, buys reverse repos from NY Fed trading desk

Should a stablecoin have ONE or MANY real world assets?
Frax believes should just have one – “deposits on the Fed ledger”
Not going to lend to others – too hard to assess that risk
Maker plans to do this – it’s profitable, you take more risk

Goal is:
One entity – Frax DAO
One RWA (Fed deposits), not 50, not many counterparties
Whole stack simple – no intermediaries

Frax ETH – stablecoin pegged 1:1 to ETH, fully backed (100% CR), no interest, like wETH
Can stake in ETH PoS vault to earn interest – separate token from Frax ETH – currently offering 10% yield (but will likely drop as it grows), part of this is because people need to choose between staking Frax ETH or putting into eg Curve pool
Already 4th largest LSD
Frax core teams runs all the PoS validators – commodity hardware, geo-distributed – will eventually allow others to run validators
Protocol takes 10% cut of staking yields – 2% put aside for slashing risk
Lido has whitelist – to become a validator, have to ID and KYC – if slashed, losses are socialized

Measure of currency’s usage = amount of spot demand, amount of spot holdings
Like USDC, Tether, and Dai – they don’t incentivize any stablecoin holders, only way to measure organic demand for currency

Frax USD goal is to get as close to USDC as possible (100% CR, “risk free”, only one real world asset), but without blacklist

Podcast notes – Buying Caitlin Pyle’s Proofread Anywhere for $3M (online course) – Acquiring Minds

Guest: Dom Wells
Host: Will Smith

$3-3.5M annual sales with extremely high margins

Proofread Anywhere – teaches people how to make money online as proofreaders
Female founder was face of the course

One-time fee, various tiers
Community access
Smaller courses as side offers

Buyer didn’t think of it as just a proofreading course, but as one of many ways to “make income online”

$500 course is main offer

How can she charge that much?
-Premium positioning
-Large audience, with existing brand affinity
-Course has a good reputation

Launched in 2014
Founder is Caitlin Pyle
50K people have done it
Backend uses Clickfunnels
Well-known in Clickfunnels community

Buyer was already familiar with her brand

She started as a proofreader herself, teaching her own experience and story

Big risk if buyer takes over a brand whose founder is the face
In this case, Caitlin created all the content, but she wasn’t running the business – already had a professional operator
She wasn’t actively marketing it, either — mostly from Facebook ads
She’d already created 6-12 months of ad creatives
They bought rights to use her image for 2 years after acquisition

Buyer had previously done a similar transaction – had sold his own business and was face of that brand, saw it play out successfully

One way is slowly transition a new face in
Did it with a podcast host before

“Most people don’t care”
New users won’t really know or remember

Plan to hire some of her best students as brand evangelists – already 50K (or 15K?) students
Could be even more powerful story – took the course and now make living as proofreader

Most users’ intro to brand is a free webinar, free workshop – but stepping up immediately to $500 course can be jarring
Want to implement a lower priced ($29) offering

Downside of Udemy – difficult to build sales funnel to really grow students (top classes on Udemy have say 1000 students)
Proofread Anywhere uses Clickfunnels
Buying a course and taking it off Udemy can be risky – but could be potential strategy

Podcast notes – Overpriced JPEGs – guest Tim Ferriss: “Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great”

Guest: Tim Ferriss
Host: Carly Reilly (w/ Bankless)

“The way you do anything is how you do everything”

Experimented with NFTs for last 2 years

Describes himself as writer or podcaster to unfamiliar people

Very competitive person – wants to suffer a little

Cockpunch – origin story
-Started w/ desire to be less precious about creative projects, looking for joy and fun and laughter
–Likes playing with new technology sandboxes
-Was drawing characters with gauntlets – the name Cockpunch popped into his mind
-Lets him play with 3d modeling, rigging, voice acting, music – lets him acquire skills that can be transferred to other places – vehicle for learning

AI art competition
-entrants had to show their work
-based on Cockpunch characters
-teaching himself – and then teach others

Chose fiction to let himself focus less on metrics, a “quantitative prison”

“Most people who want feedback…want positive reinforcement”

In any new space, tries to find someone with 10K foot view across many projects to get advice

Lots of folks get lost in weeds with NFTs / web3

Decided on 5555 mints – wanted to make sure it sells out

“There are a lot of whiny bitches in web3”

Likes advice of Scott Adams (Dilbert creator)
Thinks in terms of 6 month projects and 2 week experiments
Snowball of relationships and skills from project to project

Created term “Emergent Long Fiction”
Fiction lets him learn from new people
Set a few conditions upfront – a few characters, realms, drivers
There’s competitive games
But where it goes from here – he doesn’t necessarily know (hence “emergent”)

Set constraints and explore how creative you can be

Most people don’t know what they want

Hard to get clear signal when you ask a large audience what they want

Bullish on tokenized assets and digital scarcity

Been thru many cycles of tech
Always some new tool / platform that people say you have to use (eg, Vine)
“Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great”

Web3 isn’t going away
But NFTs – he doesn’t know – it’s one of the meanest most aggressive communities

In this bear market, he’s down 70% net worth – but it doesn’t entitle him to behave like an asshole

Public perception of NFTs (in his audience) has soured tremendously – like a dirty word
But he likes to cull his audience from time to time if they don’t have patience or understanding

Cockpunch as an unlock has exceeded all his expectations – relationships, what he’s learning

Fiction doesn’t always mean a novel – it means story telling
Didn’t plan to do a Discord – it self-organized
In Discord – use your Cockpunch NFTs, with attributes – uses ChatGPT to write a match summary (blow by blow) of a cock fight
Others added music, voice commentary

// stopped taking notes after ~1 hour

Podcast notes – Ezra Klein show – Legal fictions with Prof Katharina Pistor: Lehman had 200 legal entities when it failed

Host – Roge Karma (Ezra Klein on holiday)
Guest – Katharina Pistor

Capital is actively created by legal system

Landlord rights originating in feudal era have carried over to modern economy, and been applied to more and more assets

Legal precondition: the right to own something defines Capital

Capital has 4 attributes that allow holders to generate / protect wealth over time
1. Priority – competing claims, some have better rights than others
2. Durability – protect and separate certain assets
3. Convertibility – how financial assets attain durability, you can convert riskier assets into safer assets in crisis times
4. Universality – legal techniques will be enforced against the world; state will help protect you

Land and property rights are conflated, but think about all the open land that existed throughout history
When we want to MONETIZE the land, we need to allocate rights and exclude others, and then you can sell it, mortgage it

England took 200 years to enclose its land, turning land into capital through a complicated process

Distinction is between creation of wealth in front end, and distribution of wealth in back end – she’s focused on creation of wealth (the pre-distribution)
That creation process already has the DNA of a certain social structure – but it’s separate from back end, from re-distribution

Creation of capital of all types – whether land or today’s complex financial instruments – it’s all the same legal DNA

Land was most important source of wealth until 19th-20th century

IP rights is a newer type of asset – patents, copyrights, trademarks – these are legal inventions, enforceable IOUs
But the same general process (that applied to land) was applied to IP

But these same legal processes are responsible for a lot of inequalities and historic injustice

Corporations are separate legal persons
Creatures of the law, separate from its founders and management
Corporations live longer than humans
Limited liability rights
Broadens access to capital
Incentivizes risk taking

But in recent times, limited liability has changed in how its applied
When company fails, workers and creditors will lose
Sometimes this is abused – eg, a corporations can create another corporation – but if this subsidiary goes under, legal shield protects the main corporation

Lehman when it failed – had 200+ legal entities
60 entities in Delaware alone, 30 in UK
Why? Raise more debt finance, play tricks to funnel profits and shelter liabilities
eg, main entity shareholders get all profits and dividends, but the subsidiaries take the losses (ultimately the creditors)

*Stopped ~35 minutes into episode

Podcast notes – Mr. Beast on Lex Fridman: “Subscribers is a vanity metric”

Started notes ~an hour in

If he interviews job applicants who say their goal is movies or some other thing, instant rejection – YouTube should be THE goal

$100K is around max prize giveaway that most captures attention – above that, diminishing returns

First time in western social media you can go viral on all platforms with same content (short viral video)

Viral videos is a teachable skill

Lex: crucial part of your success is idea generation – others don’t put enough ideas on paper

Every 6 months, you should look back and be embarrassed by your old videos – otherwise you’re not learning enough

Need to be endlessly learning – will go on walks and call people to learn stuff

If new channel, what should you do?
“Just fail”
Your first 10 videos will not get views
Just start uploading
Make 100 videos and improve something every time – better script, better editing, better thumbnails
Maybe by 101st video you’ll have some views and can get serious
No such thing as a perfect video – every little thing can be improved

Create best ideas – then determine if they’re doable (don’t let practicality stop you)
eg, when they gave away a $10M island, really had to find creative methods to find a worthwhile island

It’s about intuition – you know your viewers the best, you spent most time on your content, trust your gut

His typical viewer: “a teenager boy that plays video games”
But if 30% of his viewers are women, and a video gets 100M views, that’s still 30M women (!)

Elon said “We want to limit the amount of regrettable minutes people spend on Twitter”

Lex: “I follow the thread of curiosity”

Lex: “I’m against centralized censorship and shadow banning”
Beast: agrees shadow banning should be transparent, you should let people know

Antarctica video
-during summertime the sun never goes down
-named a mountain that wasn’t named
-lucked out with warm weather

Process eg, Stand in circle for 100 days
-figure out idea, act on inspiration
-need independent crew for those 100 days
-need 10 cameras rolling all times – trailer, cameras, house

Process, 100 adults v 100 kids
-did 100 boys v 100 girls, people loved it, wanted to do more
-lots of shooting problems eg, room with bad acoustics
–

Earlier on, if video did bad, he’d be devastated, cry over it
Now he’s much better about it, just figure out how to improve and move on

Earlier on, spent 24 hours on deserted island – but didn’t like the footage
So scraped it, went back and spent another 24 hours LOL

Videos where weather is very hot, or filmed on water – he suffers a lot more (gets sea sick)

“Once you get over fear that you’ll wake up one day and be irrelevant”
Some creators go a little mentally insane during this process

Subscribers is vanity metric – doesn’t really correlate with views

If goal is to be super successful entrepreneur, you either need be WORKING or recharging / resting to recover
Need to find balance
Used to overwork and hate rest / downtime

Optimal day – going down list of his 8 companies, go thru biggest pain points for each (eg, Beast Burgers, Beast Charity, etc)
Delegated most day to day to his teams

For younger first time biz owners
-whenever he hires from traditional industries (eg, Disney) – they just don’t get it – YT is its own new thing
-doesn’t wanna get trapped in bubble of what works today
-shouldn’t start experimenting only when you plateau / start declining – could get even worse
–imperative to experiment while you’re still growing / winning

Beast Burgers
-just started as an experiment, didn’t plan to run a restaurant chain

Always wanted to do Feastables, hasn’t been any innovation in American snacks in a long time
“Feastables is just crushing”
Wal-Mart – didn’t think they’d do this kind of revenue
Had to stop promoting for awhile due to supply chain issues
Expect to 10x in 2023