Tag: podcast notes

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 – Blockchain debate with Blockworks, Avichal (Electric), and Haseeb (Dragonfly)

Blockworks Host Jason (J)
Avichal (A) – Electric
Haseeb (H) – Dragonfly

Crypto narratives today
Haseeb – narrative exhaustion; resurgence of Defi 2.0 (Wonderland); game fi has slowed (Axie price falling); overuse of metaverse; L1 wars have stabilized; interoperability is exciting but not many tokens yet
Avichal – far enough in bull market that everyone’s exhausted, like early 2018; is it a top signal; so much activity in every subsector

H: Lots of activity in private / early stage, but not much movement in public / blue chip tokens
So much web3 chatter, but most of the top coins aren’t really web3
It’s not like 2018 (lots of bullshit got funded, floor fell out of market, market lost confidence)
We’re in a waiting game, what’s the next big thing?
Lots of exciting tech is coming in 1-2 years, like big studio games, zero knowledge

A: As a startup, the promise carries you for a few years, and then the real work begins
Wonderland type drama happens all the time in normal startups – but now it’s public and liquid and transparent much earlier

J: In web2, founder has all the equity, but it’s almost flipped in web3, where founders can’t really sell, but the early employees can and are more anon / have more freedom

A: For best founders, money doesn’t change them but shows who they really are – they just dial up their game. It’s an interesting character test. Like Vitalik, it’s mission driven

J: Money is amplification of character

H: Blockchains as cities thesis
Will ETH win everything?
If blockchains are networks, then one will be completely dominant
But blockchains are physically constrained by decentralization and blocksize
Best analogy is land
ETH is old, congested, improvement is slow, but all the money and status is there (NYC)
Scaling: Rollups (skyscrapers); Alt L1 (build another city)
Cities become differentiated – NYC vs LA vs Chicago
This model predicts a few things:
1. Power law distribution of cities / blockchains
2. Rollups are important but not complete solutions
3. Bridges are important as crypto grows (moving between cities)

A: Worked at Google / Facebook
Think about it as countries not cities (bigger cultural differences, more protectionism), but generally agree w/ Haseeb
TikTok can be huge, but so can Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc
Free trade matters, maybe need a NATO
pmarca idea – world is moving to city-state model, away from nation-state; internet is fractured, people aggregating into tribal units that are more like Greek city-states
Are there 10 or 100 L1s?

H: markets generally are neutral; there are some axes (like cost, or privacy) where it does matter
Blockchains try to be a neutral substrate

A: Value capture is tied to L1, so maybe things evolve like Flow (gaming focused, more vertical solutions)
Will fragmentation happen at app layer, or L1 layer?

H: Ethereum doesn’t have a single culture now, NFT v Defi v web3
Balkanization will happen within L1s
Solana culture feels different – high performance, build the fastest thing, everyone makes money
But the same balkanization could happen too

J: Identity could get tied up in L1s, but your identity isn’t tied to AWS v Azure v other cloud services
Identity can shift quickly based on token performance

A: If you missed one chain’s pump, you’re motivated to find a new one, but once your net worth is tied to a chain, you’re more incentivized to identify with and stay there
If I can own a piece of the network, do I HAVE to become an evangelist?
Parallels with religion – there’s an “r factor” where the faster you grow, the more likely you can win

J: If you wanna make it in Hollywood, you go to LA, if you want money you go to NYC
AMMs / lending / blue chip apps will be utilities on each L1

A: Tribes have financial incentive to improve L1, so will build apps on top of them
Nationalism is a good comparison – each nation competes with each other, and wants to support their local economies and companies

H: rarely invests in L1s now, hard to differentiate
In 2017-18, crypto was 95% religion, not many real use cases
Now you have real use cases decided by technical differences of scalability and cost and speed
Becoming less about religion, more about needs

A: At 2B crypto users, we may need a lot more L1s, maybe just a period of consolidation now. It’s 5-7 blue chip L1s today, but could it become 50-70?
Also apps choose chains based on # of users too – not just optimizing tech

H: Maybe invest in Atom / Cosmos Hub to get exposure to the long tail of L1s

J: We’re agreeing on a multichain future, and need bridges to connect the chains
Bridges are harder to build than we expected

A: Anti-bridges, if 99% of users aren’t in crypto yet, you don’t want inter-op, you wanna build your own network effects
Bridges give liquidity + some users, but none of that is really sticky
Better off acquiring new users
FB doesn’t want to get MySpace users, but get new users / new demos (like college students)
Solana wasn’t EVM compatible, wasn’t trying to get ETH users, attracting different type of users / money

H: Very pro-bridge
Solana got all its users and liquidity from FTX – which was de facto a bridge
Considers Binance / FTX bridges too – way to move assets across chains
Users don’t care if bridges are centralized or decentralized
Every social network imports email graphs – that was top of funnel – which is equivalent to Ethereum in crypto today. It’s the starting point, there was an existing graph
New users are unlikely to start with Near, most likely to show up on Coinbase and Metamask

A: Point of entry into crypto is FTX / Binance / Coinbase
Bridge technical challenges will get solved
Back to nations analogy, you want capital controls / protect your native users and companies from foreign competitors
More bullish centralized bridges (like Opensea, FTX, etc, bridges broadly defined) over decentralized bridges

H: Avalanche took off because they had a good bridge
Blockchains are economies, and amount of capital really matters
Cross chain messaging is important but central bridges won’t allow that (want to control the info flow) – thus decentralized bridges are useful for that (in addition to moving capital)

J: Sometimes crypto has reverse network effects – more users = more cost and blockchains can slow down

A: R-factor and evangelism create more / less network effects
EVM is javascript of crypto
Tooling and developer network fx
Spectrum of network fx – some are strong (eg, evangelism, being anti-other chains), others are weak – wonder how this will correlate with market structure and outcomes

Podcast notes – web3 and crypto critiques with Molly White and Jason Calacanis

This Week in Startups
Host: Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood
Guest: Molly White

Ukraine
Solicited crypto donations and received millions which was withdrawn (proving that crypto can work in adverse situations)
Binance donating $10M
PussyRiot raised $3M through a DAO for war effort

Molly White – Wikipedia editor, software engineer
Saw web3 broadening in a scary way
Launched https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ to highlight the scams and shady behaviors

A lot of tech grouped into web3 umbrella that isn’t new – ledgers aren’t new; internet payment protocols aren’t new
What’s new is cryptocurrencies – but she doesn’t believe there’s a future

Take a tech problem, add blockchain tech, and raise millions
Most can do better with different database structure

Jason: immutable database is inferior tech in 99% of cases

True believers are less common these days
Usually they’re not shilling NFTs

To truly understand web3, need to understand tech, law, economics, many domains

In a normal world, you should be concerned if you’re selling something and you can’t explain why (“why do you need a blockchain?”)

Jason: bitcoin toxicity is an explicit philosophy among maxis
Another concern – Wash trading / painting the tape (trading with yourself back and forth to pump price, or with other insiders / whales)

Melania Trump – sold a watercolor NFT, but if you analyze the blockchain data, it seems like she just bought her own NFT

Celebrity grifts – De’Aaron Fox (NBA player) did an NFT project and suddenly abandoned it (a rug pull)

web3 founders seem to believe that normal laws don’t apply – eg, copyright law
class action lawsuits have been filed, eg, Kim Kardashian

Jason: in middle of ICO lawsuits now, and NFT lawsuits will be coming in a few years
“it’s a cult”
bitcoin is good store of value, hasn’t been hacked, easy to trade

If economy collapses (Mad Max), how will bitcoin really be useful?

Energy use
Proof of work has to be increasingly energy intensive, otherwise it doesn’t work
You can’t mine on home PC anymore

What about developing economies / authoritarian regimes?
Bitcoin has more use, but exposed to new types of risk (how to actually convert to fiat, price volatility)
eg, Canadian trucker protests – difficulties withdrawing bitcoin to cash

DAOs
Why are smart contracts and blockchains required for self governance?
Most DAOs are – buy token, token = vote
Someone hijacked a DAO by buying up a lot of tokens and then drained its treasury
Self governing communities are very difficult

To believe in pure decentralization / immutability, you have to be very extreme
True believers are more libertarian / anarchist
But newer ones try to parrot it but don’t realize the drawbacks / tradeoffs

Jason: BAYC founders not happy they were doxxed – but it’s a billion dollar project!

Even doxxing has been subverted – it’s serious and egregious
But in crypto doxxing can be good – because the founders aren’t anon
BuzzFeed doxxing of BAYC was very easy / light – but reporter was aggressively doxxed in return

A lot of them are very very young – 19yo and controlling $2M

Podcast notes – Leo Lucisano on crypto regulatory predictions (On The Brink)

Leo Lucisano – partner at Decentral Park Capital
On The Brink podcast, host Matt Walsh

What is DPC
Digital asset investor focused on DEFI
Just closed $75M DeFi fund
Invest across stages from pre-token / early stage to liquid investments

CPA, legal training
Worked at:
PWC – MBS and structured products
A SoFi competitor in Silicon Valley
Challenger bank in Sweden

Wrote a popular blog post on regulations
https://decentralparkcapital.substack.com/p/the-regulatory-state-22-predictions

In near term, expect tokens to be treated as securities, regulators won’t have time or expertise to properly identify “decentralized” products
Regulators have been very aggressive and will continue to be

Stablecoin regulation is coming, fit into money market / charter regime – lowest hanging fruit
Then custody – will shape how big banks and institutional custodians move into crypto and also control current CEXes, infrastructure

For large protocols focus is consumer protection
eg, Uniswap, “soft decentralization” (DAO) – still have flag bearers / people to target

Could be a Day of reckoning – tons of SEC enforcement actions against multiple projects

Expects spot ETF by July – SEC will use it to control institutional funds flow

Growing economic incentives for tradfi (eg, Wall Street banks) to pressure regulators to clarify rules, ease their entry into crypto

Challenger banks coming into crypto – like Robinhood and Square

Fairly ingrained web of contagion in crypto now – almost impossible nut to crack, but regulators must do it anyway

Fully regulated – crypto builders are doing KYC from beginning
Fully decentralized – eg Synthetix – will do ok during this regulatory wave

NFT financialization – rapidly growing space – looks a lot like defi

Regulation’s 3 buckets
1. tax revenue
2. consumer protection
3. anti money laundering (AML)

Likely that after this wave of tough 2022 regulation, we’ll see enormous growth

Crypto lobby has really matured, started in 2021
Local politicians are embracing the crypto discussion
Becoming a single issue topic – pro-crypto is good for social engagement, political donations
“power of crypto twitter”

2022 is year of the industry growing up

Podcast notes – Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss Show
Guest Arnold Schwarzenegger
2015 podcast re-broadcast

Likes pranks and practical jokes
When things get intense, he tries to lighten things up – “in 10 years we’ll laugh about this”

Grew up in Austria
No running water – had a well 100 yards away
Had a chamberpot for a toilet
Never felt poor, because they were surrounded by farmers and poor workers
Dad was cop

Where does his confidence come from?
Clear vision – you know why you’re suffering
Wanted to win Mr. Universe – visualized it clearly
Wanted audience and other bodybuilders to idolize him
“Not there to compete, there to win”

Psychological warfare
People are vulnerable in certain areas
If you criticize people, watch how they react, freak out, shrink
Let’s talk about your weakness, then let’s rebuild everything

Sports are not just physical thing – mental strength is more important
Among bodybuilding finalists – not much difference in how you look, it’s about how you act, your posing routine, your psychology

He never auditioned in Hollywood
Carved out a different niche
Lots of criticism that he looked too big, too muscular, his accent
Made Conan and Terminator – both directors said Arnold was only one who could do it
“What agents said was an obstacle became an asset”

Business / Entrepreneurship
Became a real estate millionaire before his Hollywood career really took off (after Conan in 1982)
Bot an apartment building – in 70s, inflation was high, could leverage up
Also had a home construction company, employed other bodybuilders
Then had a mail order business
Each decade offered a unique opportunity that he took advantage of
eg, 80s and rise of action films

Franco Columbu
Friend who he brought over from Europe, was training and business partner, strongman + power lifter + body builder
won Mr Universe and Mr Olympia
spoke no English initially
studied and became a chiropractor

Language / accent
Austrians are like Southerners – have unique German accent
Never intended to lose his accent – but rather focus on speaking it clearly, enunciating
eg, Kissinger’s and Huffington’s accent become part of their identity

Film career
Twins – Ivan Reitman helped him develop the idea, bring out his funny side, partners with him and Danny
made more on Twins than any other movie
cost $18M, earned $200M+ globally

Why not finance the film himself?
Felt like he should focus on performance, not investing as it’s totally different pursuit

Passionate about afterschool programs
Saw that during the 3-6pm period (after the school day), kids don’t have enough support / supervision, and get into trouble as a result
Feels good to help those in need, that’s what life is all about

Who Arnold admires
Gates, Buffett, Elon Musk
Nelson Mandela – showed power of tolerance / forgiveness / inclusion
Gorbachev – grew up under Communism and had chutzpah to dismantle it
Muhammad Ali – successful in sports and public service
Cincinnatus – Roman emperor, farmer who was asked to lead Rome, and after he succeeded, he went back to farming; and he did that twice!
“very addictive to be powerful”

Favorite books
Book about Churchill
“Free to choose” by Milton Friedman
California by Kevin Starr

In 1970s, too many things happening in his life, was hard to find mental clarity
Found a transcendental meditation teacher
20 mins morning & night, learned to disconnect and rejuvenate his mind
Can find meditation space while at the gym (because of the focus and concentration, can lose himself in it)

Wants subnational governments (like California) to set their own policy goals, such as crusading for a renewable energy future