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

Lecture notes: Gary Marcus on the human mind as a kluge (Google talks) – “Evolution is a tinkerer using spare parts”

New book: Kluge, the haphazard construction of the human mind

Hamlet: “what a piece of work is man…how noble in faculty”

Bertrand Russell: “it’s been said man’s a rational animal…all my life I’ve been searching for evidence that could support this”

Argues man is the RATIONALIZING animal (not the “rational animal”) – searching for reasons to explain why we do what we do

Default thinking is that natural selection leads to human optimalism
But how to reconcile with the manifest clumsiness of the human mind?

Visual system evolving for a billion years
But distinctively human things – like talking, rational deliberation – these are much more recent (eg, 50-100K years ago)

Hill climbing metaphor – issue of local maxima
Evolution won’t necessarily lead to superlative adaptation

Human spine is a kluge – but not best way to support bi-pedal creature, leads to back pain / fragility – eg, multiple columns would be better solution

Evolution builds kluges because it has no foresight nor hindsight – it’s effectively blind
Evolution is always in a hurry – shipping deadline of “now”

Darwin didn’t say “survival of the fittest” – what he meant was fittest of the available options
It’s really “Descent with modification”

Bird’s wing is a modification of the forelimb of all 4-legged creatures – wasn’t designed from scratch as best possible wing

Concept of “evolutionary inertia”
Genes are conserved
Evolution is a tinkerer using spare parts

Kluge is about 3 things
1. Limits of human mind
2. Where they came from
3. What we can do about them

Computer memory – there’s a master map of where everything is stored – like a series of safe deposit boxes
Stored once, saved forever

Human memories are nowhere near as reliable – there’s no master map
Human memory balances 2 things: RECENCY and FREQUENCY
That’s why you often forget where you put your keys, where you parked your car
That’s why pilots use checklists to make sure they do all the required tasks
Evolution didn’t bless us with an erase feature

Brain uses a broadcast system to retrieve info and memories – doesn’t know where individual memories are

Memory is context dependent – if you study while stoned, you might be better off taking test while stoned
Even your posture (eg, seated or standing) can affect memory recall (!)
Seems to apply to rat + maze experiments too

Eyewitness testimony is particularly subject to these memory errors
Shooting incident with 30 eyewitnesses where the witnesses cannot agree about what happened

Framing: “estate tax” versus “death tax”

Garbage in > garbage out

We take biased samples of data and reason from those limited samples

Confirmation bias – eg, religious beliefs, presidential elections

Depression – being depressed means you’re more likely to have depressing thoughts, negative spiral – normal brains have ability to stop this process

Languages have lot of ambiguities – “the spy shot the cop with the revolver”

Moral dilemmas – trolley problem – a person’s judgment can be affected by how messy the experimental room is!

Data aging or how technology amplifies our lived experience

Fascinating concept from VGR: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/superhistory-not-superintelligence

To quote:

Those of us who have been using Google search for 22 years are /already/ like 100 years older than our biological age. Every year lived with Google at your fingertips is like 5 lived within the limits of paper books. In many ways, I feel older than my father, who is 83. I know the world in much richer, machine-augmented ways than he does, even though I don’t yet have a prosthetic device attached to my skull. I am not smarter than him. I’ve just data-aged more than him.

And:

But when Magnus Carlsen defeated Vishwanathan Anand in 2013, something weird and new was on display. I’m not a chess player, but from the commentary I read, it seems like not only was Carlsen more of a raw talent than Anand (same as Kasparov vs. Karpov) but he was also “older” in a weird way, despite being nominally 21 years younger. Carlsen is young enough to have been effectively “raised by AIs” — the most sophisticated chess AIs available on personal computers when he was growing up in the aughts. His playing style was described as kinda machine-inspired, pushing hard all the way through the end, exploring unlikely and unconventional lines of play where human tradition would suggest conceding.

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