YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Dixon

lines on the record: 82
first: 2021-10-28
most recent: 2021-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Utah. It's the homebrew computer club. The homebrew computer club of 2021 is probably a DAO. We want to join a bunch of them and just learn from these people who are just more in the, they're smart and they're in the trends. And this is how we learn, right?”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Community with a balance sheet. Okay, so it's an internet community, but they also have resources and can do stuff. In the particular case, FWB is a bunch of Web3 product developers. So it's a couple thousand people who are really high-end, high-quality product developers, and they're spinning out cool. They have events. We hosted an event in New York with them. It's like someone in our team said, oh my God, this new wave of crypto is like 100x cooler than all of us. It's very different than 2017 and 2016, you know, a bunch of computer nerds talking about protocols. This is the coolest people from Williamsburg. But which is great, but they're great community. They're designers, they're developers, they don't, they're not sort of hard. Like they really got into this stuff kind of more recently, which is good because they really got, I think the cultural aspects got them excited, the NFT stuff more than, you know, to them, like money, the money stuff before was kind of a turnoff. And it's just like a cool, I don't know, it's like it's, you know.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so one of the things we started doing six months ago is we started pretty investing, heavily investing in this area called DAOs. This is a new type of investment where there really isn't like even in many cases like a legal entity and we're buying tokens and other kinds of things. And there's a lot of questions, but it's early, but we want to be there on the frontier. And I think this is the frontier.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The power, but that's a very valuable thing that people will use from incentives and various other things. I mean, if you have a crypto funk, that says a lot about you.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for example, people talk about ticketing with NFTs, and what they mean is going to existing event with tickets, like a sports game or music show, right? But actually, that's humorphic. I think the native version of ticketing is you have a Tim Ferris NFT, and now I get to, or let's say, whatever, some Nike NFT and I get a certain seat at this restaurant. Why do wealthy people invest in restaurants? They don't invest because they want to invest in restaurants. They invest in getting a good cable. Like, why not just skip the whole investing part and just have an NFT? Have a bunch of NFTs. I guarantee you in the next six months, we're going to see conventions and other kinds of things of NFT, board apes, and crypto punks. And by the way, if you're a business and you want to find some really good customers, people that own crypto punks are probably really good customers. I think you can see a world where instead of doing the Web2 companies surveilling you and trying to figure out your interests, you're just declaring your interest through NFTs. And so it's done in an opt-in way that's pro user, the user has”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's teenage dance videos on TikTok tailing a car, ephemeral messaging. No one knew. It's so hard to know, right? So we're turn that beard, I think.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mobile phone's the same thing. Remember, mobile phones are always like stock and weather. They always have talked about stocks and weather. That was it.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what I'm saying, of course, is he's a genius, but it's just really hard to know. So the first thing you do is, I guess they had like a filing system, whatever. But then what happens, right? This army of people come and they invent the word processor and the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was a random guy in Boston who just came up with the idea of a spreadsheet and desktop publishing and video games and just this whole wave after wave of cool stuff, which even the inventor, I'm just trying to make the point of how hard it is. And so I think we're probably in the kitchen recipe period of NFTs, which is awesome because there's going to be so much cool stuff. I don't even know how you got the recipes back then. They didn't have the internet. Got it.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Software you can plug and play onto it just like the App Store. One of my favorite things to do is look at old computer ads. It's funny because in the 80s, all the computer ads had this couple at the table doing recipes. Steve Jobs, as much of a genius as he was, like greatest genius of all time, he vents the computer, vents the iPhone, and the best idea he had for what to do with a computer in 1983 was a couple organizing their kitchen recipes.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing to add to what you're saying is we're probably in this schemorphic period right now. I don't know what the native generative art looks like. It's probably. To advance for my artistic sense or something, but just timing wise almost always, we'll look back and say this is a schemorphic period. They aren't leaning into the software code enough. The stuff you mentioned is like a nice kind of coding thing, but I bet you, this is arbitrary code. I mean, you can have, we have one company manifold, which is trying to create sort of let smart contracts, NFTs, be like an app store. And you have different...”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take music. How much do you love music? The supply is there, the demand is there. We just don't have the right model in between. It's not like people don't, people are crazy about music. They love music. And there's plenty of people with money who love music. So why are music? Should be a golden period. The generative art stuff is cool. I'm not an expert on it, but I just think it's so cool that now there's a business model for generative art. That is awesome. And the kids that get excited by that and go into, I'm going to be a generative artist. That might be a new thing 10 years from now.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we were just dramatically underpaying creative people, in my view. And we've now figured out a way to pay them properly. And that's going to lead to a huge new wave of creative activities, not just technology and not just paying existing musicians. Maybe we enter a world where there's instead of 8 million musicians on Spotify, there's a billion. Maybe there's a billion musicians, there's a billion artists, there's a millions of generative artists. I think this is the right kind of evolution of the internet. This should be a golden period for creative people. There are 8 billion people and 6 billion or whatever internet connected. And you only need 1,000 to make a living. This should be the greatest time in history for creative people. And I think we might have finally figured it out.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. That's right. I think there's a lot of, I think that's one of the cool things here is when you create a better business model for art, let's say, or for music. Step one will be you take the existing artists and they get more money. Step two is you're going to incentivize a whole new generation to go do these cool things. With a generative art, now you have a way to make money on it. And so there's just going to be all these smart people attracted to creative things, which I think is a great thing.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, when you buy these things in Naval's point, buy things in communities you value and expect them to be illiquid for a very long time. If you buy a crypto bunker board ape or something else, it's because you want to be part of that community. That should be the motivation.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, the other interesting thing, one reason I think this is sort of so powerful is that we've spent the last 30 years building communities on the internet. We didn't have a good way for them to accrue value. But the killer app of the internet is networks. We've got a million networks built on this thing now, Discords and Reddits and Twitter followings. It's all built out. And now we're dropping in this way to have now these community artifacts and things with value. And I think it's very important though to think of it in that context and not what I think the mistakes some people are making now, and this is they're thinking of it more transactionally. It's a cash grab. That's the wrong way and that will backfire. You need to do it in the way that the community really aligns with the values of the community.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dig in. And so I think the same thing, I would say for you, Tim, I would encourage you when you think about your NFTs to sort of think of it in that way. These are artifacts. These are artifacts of the community. And by buying one, you're sort of buying both, you're supporting your cause, but you're also kind of buying into that community.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think another lens to look at NTs through is you go to the museum and you see a Roman statue. There's sort of two ways you could interpret that. One is the piece of stone, and that's sort of just a JPEG. The other, I think, the correct way, the more sophisticated way, is to see it as a community artifact. It has meaning and value, that statue, as part of that community of ancient Rome. And I think the same thing is true with NFTs. NFTs are artifacts of networks. So like you have your own community. And the NFTs you're creating will be artifacts for that community. And they derive value to the extent that they kind of reinforce that community's values and norms and language and memes. That's what crypto punks really. You're owning a piece of this community that has importance in the history of the internet and the history of crypto. If you take it out of that, that's when you get to just a JPEG, right-click, and save things. I used to do this with, you know, I go to the metropolitan museum of art. Oh, look, that's a sword. If you dismiss it like that, sure. But if you want to go and”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely only Only recommend buying things that you want to keep and not things you think will go up in value because that's dangerous.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About came from actually the invention of the LLC. And I bring that up because I think it's very analogous to I kind of see the historical progression of partnerships for 10 people, 10 people could accrue value. In a LLC world, a million people can accrue value. And in a token world, a billion people can. It's this natural kind of progression. And it also shows you that tech is not just always tech. Tech is sometimes social and legal structures like the LLC. So it's a very short book. I think the part I'm discussing might only be two chapters of it or something. But I thought fascinating because I don't think we normally think of these kinds of legal innovations as a kind of a quote tech breakthrough. So I don't know. I think there's a lot of, obviously there's a lot of great books. I love books. Teachers happen to come to mind.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An investor, you could lose more than your money. And so as a result, you only had partnerships of like 10 and fewer people, basically families. Because who are you going to trust if you have unlimited liability? It's like your brother and your so-and-so, but like nobody else. And then what happened is in the 1830s or so, there was this railroad boom in the UK first, I believe, and then in the US. And they needed daggery capital. So anytime two towns would link up a railroad, their economies would like 5x. So every town basically had this giant line of people at parliament saying, hey, can we get limited liability? Because we can't afford to build that railroad, but we know it'll pay off. But we need to be able to go out to third parties and get that capital. And so that eventually was very controversial. And it took 30 years or something. But finally, that became, and that was like the business model of Delaware, by the way, which is genius. They were like, hey, we'll be the place you go. Finally, it became understood this was a very important innovation. I would argue that actually a lot of the Victorian industrial stuff I was just talking about.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company, yeah, and I can follow up the link, but But it's a history of limited liability corporation, which is a very, very controversial concept to have limited liability. Because the thought before, this is around 1830 when it started to develop, was that you basically before that, you had to have an act of parliament in the UK to get limited liability. Because it was considered this very dangerous thing. Why shouldn't you be fully liable? If you start a railroad company and somebody dies, you should go to jail. And so what that meant before the LC. Was that if you were going to invest,”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just went town to town selling them and like use my system. And there was this awesome moment at the end that kind of coup de grace was Westinghouse built the key benefit of ACs. It goes farther without losing power. He built this giant plant up at Niagara Falls and then turned the lights on in Buffalo. And it was like this magic act. Also, they all borrowed tons of money. And I think what's cool about them is they're all engineers. It reminds me a lot. They all started off in the telegraph business, which at the time was sort of the internet of that era. So that was cool. There's another book. Sorry, I have crypto on my brain. I can't help it. There's a book I really like called The Company, a short history of the LLC. This is a fascinating book.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mentioned, I really like history, and I particularly like the era of the Victorian industrial age of 1850 to 1920 or something. It's an amazing period where I kind of think of it as a period where you had like 100 Elon Musk. So you had Westinghouse and Edison and Ford and the Wright brothers and just Bell and just goes on and on, right? And you had that period where just the number of incredible inventions during that period, in that 50-year period, I mean, the airplane, the car, the phonograph, the light bulb, for God's sake. This amazing book called Empires of Light. It's the battle between Westinghouse and Edison. Really, it's fascinating. It was enterprise sales. They invent the light bulb. Westinghouse has AC, Edison has DC.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I feel like in hierarchy, I don't know how you feel about it. Maybe they'll discover that the Trident gum kills you or something. I hope not.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might be true. It might be true. Think at this point I smoked a long time ago, so that's why it was a long time ago. But I just after that, I just always chewed gum. I think it's just like a nervous habit or something.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god. Katie told you this, huh? Well, you know, of all the bad habits to have at this point, I have one, which is like, yeah, I chew gum nonstop. And I don't know, for whatever reason, it seems to annoy some people, but I was doing this DAO called Friends of Benefits that we invested in, and I did a kind of a community talk as part of kind of our investment process and was chewing gum the whole time. And it actually became kind of a meme after that. Now”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like it'd be cool too if you had, you could do, there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff you could do. You could have seasons, so you could have the first collection of season one and then another collection season two. That's a cool thing people are doing. You can make it into a DAO so that the folks, maybe the folks who have NFTs get to go into a private Discord server. You have some events with them. Maybe you give them some governance rights in deciding which projects to fund. And think of it as like then you have this, I don't know how many NFA, that's just the number of people pick. You have this army of not only do you have funding, but you have evangelists in their meaning and their... Twittering and writing about it”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Web 3, a very bad name. We want to get rid of those people. I think that the goals are actually much more aligned. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I feel like it's a communication problem.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a communication challenge, I think. If we can go and talk to folks and show, one, what the socially beneficial thing uses of this technology is, having creators who are making a living and all sorts of other things like that are very important for that reason, and then also just sort of explain and show that the goals are aligned and that we don't want a situation where, I mean, no one wants a situation where there's sort of asymmetric information and bad stuff happening. And there's money involved, as with all sort of tech things and money involved, there are bad people for sure. It's just inevitable. It happened in the 90s. It happened in the 2000s. It happens now. And those people give”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not tech modern practices like putting your driver's license in front of a thing that has like a 50% failure rate for KYC or something. Let's modernize these things. So that's one of the things we're working on is what's the crypto native way to modernize a lot of these processes and get the goal. The goals are very good. Like securities laws makes a lot of sense because securities laws all around situations where there's asymmetric information. And when there's asymmetric information because there's a centralized entity that has knowledge of things, you need to have rules around disclosing that information. Securities laws are a set of rules around liability and disclosure to make sure there's a level information playing field. That makes a lot of sense. We like that. And we think a great way to not have asymmetric information is to have no company. That's a really good way to have no asymmetric information. The SEC has the same goal we have, which is let's get rid of these intermediaries. They do it for asymmetric information reasons. We're doing it for sort of other ideological reasons as we discussed here. But it's very aligned. I think it works very nicely, actually. The challenge right now, as I was saying before, is much more”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or not, these are topics that we've spent years on and countless legal resources analyzing and working on. But the way that the regulators have chosen to enforce this is not through guidance, but through this seemingly hard to understand set of enforcement actions as an example. So I think clarity would be great. I think probably a lot of this has to happen at the policy level. I think modernizing a lot of these things, as Naval was saying, these rules are from the 1930s and 40s. And a lot of them just involve very...”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of politicians and policymakers and things who do understand this. And what we would like, so there's been a couple things. One, there's just been no clarity. So there's sort of two ways that regulators regulate. And one is through stating policies and one is through enforcement. And so far it's all been just through enforcement. And so people just don't know what to do. And as a result, so one of the big myths in crypto is that it's unregulated. Okay, I will tell you, we have more regulators and policies and lawyers and things. I've practically become a lawyer. I spend so much time on this stuff. The first thing we do in every company we invest in is help them recruit a general counsel. They all spend millions of dollars on outside counsel. Everyone wants to be as compliant as they can, obviously. It's very strong incentive for them to do so. There's lots of regulations that apply to these companies, including consumer protection laws, commodities laws, et cetera. And no one questions that. And they all have to have policies and adhere to those things. There's specific questions around things like what qualifies an asset to be a secure.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Naval and I we could very easily invest in other countries. We don't want to. I mean, frankly, when you're investors, it's not easy to move around and invest other places and things like this. I just think it would be a real shame if that's the outcome.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“OpenSea founders, all of these other founders in our portfolio, I believe they're heroes. I believe they are heroes who are on the cutting edge of the frontier and creating very important technology that will transform the internet. And I believe that over time, more people will come to realize that these are people in the mold of Steve Jobs or Henry Ford. This is how America stays ahead. We believe this completely and we believe this is critical for the future of the Internet and critical for the future of this country. That's why we're investing so much in.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so we try to create a bunch of materials to sort of explain it. Our firm, we believe in innovation and we believe in America. A lot of other people in crypto will do things with offshore entities and things we don't. We tell people you should be based in the US, you should be a US company, pay US taxes, Uniswap, they're in New York City. They have an office in Soho. They hire people from New York. They go to their office. We have some European investments and things, but most of our investments are here in America. And I believe Hayden Adams, who's the founder of Uniswap, Robert Lesher, the founder of Compound.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things we've tried to do is create materials for this. So we have, for example, which I could share the link afterwards. It's like a 35 page overview for policymakers. Kind of talks about the benefits and things like that. So we've been trying to create materials like that. I think it's one of the things been lacking is just all the good things Naval talked about earlier, the meming, the Twitter stuff, everything else. It's what's wonderful about this world is sort of the chaos. But at the same time, it's also useful to have a 30-page booklet sometimes. So we've tried to do kind of add that a little bit on there.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big challenge we have is just to really kind of go and explain these things. I think the good news is we have truth on our side. Everything I'm saying here and everything I've tweeted is mathematically provable, including the fact that a blockchain is a computer and the power of this new paradigm. But there's a lot of communications challenges ahead.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's going to be just a centralized. That's just not going to work. The thing that will work is let innovators and entrepreneurs go build a better internet. That's what we want to do. To me, this is not a political movement in that sense. It's a technology movement. And it's somehow gotten associated with politics. Things in this country right now, it's very heated in the political world.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With, I think, a lot of the left agenda, which is better distribution of wealth, reigning in the power of some of the big tech companies. The differences we're arguing to do it through innovation and competition, not through regulation, which won't work, by the way. If they cut up Facebook and three networks, it's not going to change anything. It's exactly the same thing. Instagram's still going to be Instagram and the economics are going to be the same.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and to your point, Tim, I think that some of this was sort of self-inflicted, and particularly around certain what we call maxies, people that are into certain tokens, and only that token should exist. So there's Bitcoin maximalists, there's Ethereum Max, et cetera. Those folks are just, they tend to be kind of loud and somewhat aggressive. And I think that's done a lot of the branding Comes from some of those folks who, some of them like in the Bitcoin world, they have a But there's sort of this libertarian aspect of Bitcoin. And I think as a result, particularly as we're seeing now, the democratic side thinks of crypto as the enemy. That the stuff we're talking about, the Web3 stuff,”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the core concept in machine learning when you design these systems how to optimally kind of come to conclusion? So that's the idea a little bit. It's just you should have, I think people in their 20s, for example, should add not randomness, not literally randomness, but exploration. They should go try a bunch of different things. See what's the right hill. And also be willing to take a step back.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Away. The next promotion, the next bonus, whatever it is. And they kind of are on that treadmill and not willing to go, for example, join a startup and take us what appears to be a step backwards, but is in fact a much bigger hill. And they get caught up in the kind of local maximization thing and end up, and I think you find a lot of people who are unhappy in their careers when they're in their 30s and 40s. It's because they hill climbed the wrong hill. The lesson I take from the computer science is to add some randomness to some exploration. There's a concept in machine learning. It's called exploration versus exploitation. You want to always have a balance between, for example, I try to use this when I order food. So I will make sure that sometimes I'm exploiting. Exploiting means I'm going to my favorite restaurant, but half the time I'm also trying a new restaurant.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, hill climbing, it's a class of kind of algorithms. The metaphor is think of a landscape with a bunch of hills. And the goal is to get to the highest point, but put this constraint on, let's say it's foggy, you can only see a little bit in front of you or behind you. And so there's a class of algorithms that sort of basically talk about what's the optimal way to climb that hill. One obvious one is if you're on an incline, go up. But the problem there is you might get trapped in what's called a local maxima, which is you just happen to start on a small hill. The next iteration of that is what's called simulated annealing, which is you add some randomness in there too to sort of avoid just simply going up the first hill. And so this post I wrote, I think you're talking to, this is a popular poster. It's called climbing the wrong hill. And I was making the analogy from these algorithms to a career. And the idea was just like in a career, you do want to sort of climb the hill you're on. But the mistake I saw a lot of young people making was they're at McKinsey or Google or something and they see kind of the next prize is six months.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I agree with that. And I think closely related to security, of course, is usability and just how to make everything easy to use and secure. I think it'll all get worked out, but I agree with Naval that it's not there yet. To me, the biggest challenge in the space is probably the messaging around it. I think there's a lot of misunderstandings around it. I think some of that is sort of self-inflicted by us, by the community. I think some of it hasn't diffused out into the broader world. So you just have a lot of people who react negatively to crypto, Web3, et cetera. And I think that could also lead to overzealous regulatory actions too. And so I think that is, I think it's very important to do, I think what we're trying to do here and just sort of explain these ideas. I think ultimately what usually convinces people is they need to kind of decide for themselves they want to dive into it. I've literally in eight years in the space, I've never met somebody who's very well informed on the space and also deeply.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, kind of creative core that's developing these cool ideas, and those will provide kind of the roadmap for the next wave.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simplicity that makes them so powerful, and the way you can recombine them. And that's just an early experiment. There will be many more cool experiments like that. But what's cool about that experiment, what do they say, like the Velvet Underground or something had only a thousand fans, but they all started bands kind of thing. Luke doesn't have like millions of users, but the people that like it are the best product designers in the world. I think it's going to be one of those moments where in the same way, Naval, you remember this delicious and flicker. There was this period of like 2003 to 2005 when kind of all the core Web2 primitive stuff happened. And people were like, oh my God, like tagging. I mean, it sounds hilarious today. Tagging was like a breakthrough. It was a conceptual breakthrough. Because before that, it was like, oh, you have to have categories. Everything has to be mutually exclusive buckets. Every website had this thing on the left. Everything had to be in a bucket. And tagging came and said, no, it doesn't have. You have a computer with a lot of powerful capabilities. You can just make a tag. And then default public. That was a revolutionary concept. So there was this period. I think we're in that kind of period now in this world where there's like this really.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Dom Hoffman, who's a genius developer and product designer, created this thing Loop. And what Loot is, is basically it's just these little cards that have an inventory, like kind of a Dungeons& Dragon style game. So it'll say Magic Cloak, just literally those words on a page. And those themselves are NFTs. But what's so cool about it is that it inspired this whole community of people to build around it. It's almost like if, you know, Ernest Hemingway, instead of writing the book, wrote just the first page of the book and then let the community kind of add the next page. And so that's what GOM is. He wrote, this is the beginning of it. Now let your imaginations go wild. And by the way, there won't be one canonical game. There'll be a hundred different things that all kind of use, they're in the loop verse. It's this whole tapestry of creative people adding different bricks into this new structure. And that's just a very profound new way to think about building a game and something you couldn't have done without, as Naval called it, these very simple new building blocks. And it's exactly the”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Native video on the internet. And that once you created this experience, this thing where you can embed the videos and it worked seamlessly and there weren't permission paywalls all around it, that this huge creator community would come up around it. And you'd have this whole new, and now today, dude perfect, guys messing around the basketball stuff or whatever and didn't exist back then has more subscribers than all the sports leagues combined on YouTube. It's not not only with the native products the winners, but the native creators were the winners. And so this is a concept we use a lot internally. People who know me will tell you, I always, when I'm negative on something, it's because it's schemorphic. People want to take blockchains and do like supply chain management, offline ticketing. Sorry, I'm glad their entrepreneurs in every category and I respect all entrepreneurs, but those are schemorphic ideas. I think they may work, but they're not going to be the thing people talk about 10 years from now. It's going to be this new stuff, the NFTs. So let me give you an example of a really cool project. There's this thing called loop. I've heard of loot. It's this game.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first cars they're mimicking the horses. And so the early web, for example, right? It was like brochures and magazines. So the opposite we call is sort of native. So you can do kind of web native stuff. It can be a two-way medium. It's code. You can do all sorts of other kind of cool stuff. So I think it wasn't until kind of the mid-2000s that people really started exploring the quote native web experience. And I believe the best investment approach was to bet on the native stuff. So I remember when YouTube was out, there was sort of two classes of video apps. There was the YouTube ones. And then there was these other ones which were basically saying, hey, we're going to take CBS and put it on the internet, enterprise software on a model. There weren't YouTube stars back then. So it was all just a kind of silly viral videos or things that infringed on copyright probably, right? So when they got bought by Google, that was a really controversial because it was the widespread meme kind of like crypto today. It's all this shady, dark illegal stuff. But what they understood, the founders and Google to their credit is that this was the true.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I added another respelling on this podcast. Morphic. Yeah, you got it. So I think it was a Steve Jobs word that he used this word, and he used it to refer to visual design. So if you remember the original iPhone had like a book gap and it had wood grained bookshelves. And so it was this concept and design of taking something from the offline world and using that design in the online world to make it look more familiar for whatever reason me and my colleagues started using this word all the time internally like three or four years ago. I'm not sure if we invented it or got it. I mean, not invented it, but like sort of ported it over from the design world. I don't really remember, but we'd always use it to mean you go back and look at early films. And early films looked like plays. They put people on and they would walk around and they stage it like plays. And then over time kind of film developed its own kind of new grammar. And so you had a close-up and you had an establishing shot. You go look at the old movies. They would just show Grand Central Station for like 10 minutes. And they learned over time you could just show it for like a second and the human brain would figure it out. And this happens with every new technology.”
2021-10-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT