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Chris Dixon

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2021-10-28
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2021-10-28
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  1. “Kind of cool, vibrant economy. And basically, like Axie really kind of broke out. I think it's one of the four games that have 800,000, which is the max Discord users, and it's one of the four. So it's one of the most thinking-ish active users, like very, very popular game. By the way, not in any of the app stores because Apple and Google are trying to fly Web3 bands, and yet they still have that kind of user base. And I think Axie is probably the thing that really inspired a lot of people. Why GG mentions a separate company, which actually we're also investors in, which is Yale Gil Games. It's very cool. It's almost like a, it's what we call DAO, but it's essentially it's an online software kind of organization where people can essentially get loaned axes so they can go play it and not have to pay the upfront costs and then earn money. So it's like this kind of guild model that you have in games where people kind of get together and join on the same team. But suddenly you can have sort of real money involved and people make real livings.”

    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

  2. “But those virtual goods are kind of locked into the game. Also, when you buy the virtual goods, all the money is going to the company. So what games like Axie Infinity, were investors in some of these kind of new crypto games, is instead of it being you buy the goods from the company, it's much more peer-to-peer. It's much more the way eBay and Craigslist, you're buying it from another person who themselves were able to basically improve the NFT by playing the game. And so in the case of Axie, you have something on the order of 100,000 people, many of whom are in the Philippines, who make a living playing that game. And so they go and they do a bunch of different stuff, and people call it grinding, like you kind of play a bunch of stuff, and then they make improve the NFTs, and then other people who maybe have more money than time buy them from them. And the company only takes, I think it's like a 3% take rate or something as opposed to much more like a marketplace kind of fee, as opposed to taking all the money, the kind of protocol will take lower fees, but in exchange, you've got 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

  3. “What's the model today in video games? Video games are interesting because there have been new ways of technology, but the old waves still exist. So the old way to buy a video game with something like Madden, you pay $60 or whatever it costs these days. That's still around. That business is still around. There's companies like EA that do that. But then you had layered on top of it all these kind of new, more modern, what I think of more modern companies. And like probably the best ones are things like Fortnite and Supercell, Clash Royale, and League of Legends. These are basically The model they use is the game is completely free. You can play it completely forever. And the only thing you buy are cosmetic goods. So you can't buy goods that make you win because people think that would kind of undermine the integrity of the game. So it's all just to look cool, status flex. And that's a $40 billion your industry, just the virtual goods alone. And this, by the way, same thing is going on with NFTs. It was laughed at 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It was a big joke. Of course, it wasn't, and it's very important.”

    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

  4. “Go, this is kind of a wacky analogy, but every time you go to a hotel or a restaurant, they're like, oh, you got to change your clothes and buy a new outfit. This is how the internet works today. And then you leave, like, hey, you got to give that stuff back, right? And then one day somebody comes along and they say, no, you can take it with you. Imagine the amount of innovation that would kick off. That's kind of what's been going on on the internet. We had this sort of renting fiefdom design, and we've just kind of broken it open. And so people say, oh, it's a bubble, this and that. I think it's just the beginning of this incredible 20-year kind of creative run, I believe.”

    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

  5. “Out of like riot and blizzard and things like this. I think it's close to 100% of the meetings they have now involve NFTs. The games people get this, they're at the cutting edge, especially the kind of the younger ones, the next cohort. And there is going to be so much interesting stuff. And these are going to be real utilities. So you can take this piece of art, you can take this sword, and you can mix and match and move it around. And they all kind of immediately get composability and why it's important. And we're just going to see like wave after wave of very creative things. I think of an NFT as it's as general a concept as the web page. Think about the website. When it first comes out, people are like, oh, it's a website. And they try to kind of map it to the offline world. It's like a brochure. But then as we saw over this sort of 30-year period, all of these clever people come and they innovate. It's not a website, it's a social network. It's a SaaS tool. It's a this. It's that. NFTs are going to be just as broad. It's a core new concept. The idea of owning something on the internet. Another way I like to think about it is like imagine if in the real world we couldn't own anything. And every time 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

  6. “It's just an object. Just like in the real world, we have all sorts of different classes of objects. We have art, we have utilities. I buy NFTs on foundation, which is one of our investments, which is sort of a high end NFT platform curated platform. For example, there's a science fiction writer who I, sorry, graphic designer who I bought a bunch of his NFTs, and he DMs me, and now we're friends. And it's like, I never understood people that bought physical offline art. I've never had any interest in it. Now I kind of get it though, because I'm like, hey, this guy's cool. I want to be part of his, be in his network. I do venture capital. I hang around with tech people all day. It's fun for me to be able to talk to an artist. And at the same time, I can support him in this sort of non-transactional way and be his patron. And some people are buying stuff on these websites to make money. Some are doing it to patronize. Some are doing it to, I think down the road, we're going to see more and more utility use cases. The gaming is really interesting right now. This, I think the world hasn't seen this yet, but I will tell you, we have a games group at our firm that doesn't do crypto. And it's close to 100% of the things they're seeing now. These are people out of, these are founders of country.”

    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

  7. “Those are businesses you have costs. You basically is very hard to live below that. So 14,000 kind of make a living. Out of 8 million, is that working? And I'm not blaming Spotify, by the way. A lot of that money goes to labels. And I think Spotify is a good company. It's the model. It's the logic of that model. So then you have these cases of like this musician Blau who I think he's like a medium-sized artist on Spotify. He did an NFT drop. He made $11 million. Even if you assume that $11 million is a bubble or something, people say it's a bubble. If he made a hundred thousand dollars, it's transformative. It's the same thing that's going on with Substack. And so what you have is now you have this really powerful new way for creative people who were previously getting banner ads at best, very poor monetization, are now able to go and create all sorts of interesting things. And this is, we're seeing the early versions of it. You could create a JPEG. You can create digital album art. It's sort of an obvious thing that musicians are doing now. But it can be much more than that.”

    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

  8. “Formulation like that. It's kind of amazing that they've convinced all these people. Oh, you know, Instagram, what did they pay out? Zero. Facebook, zero, Twitter, zero, YouTube, 50%. Apple, just for having the phone, they take 30%. Do you know how many businesses can't survive when you take 30%? It's kind of crazy that we put up with this. Now, as you said, put aside NFTs. Just look at like substacks. So there's no crypto in substack. So what's going on with Substack? It's a platform, like a sort of a newsletter platform you can go to as a writer and have people subscribe to it. It's relatively simple, really elegant idea. But the interesting thing you see now is you see writers who previously might make, I don't know, what, $100,000 or something getting a million dollars a year. And you see a lot of people saying, hey, that shouldn't happen. We were told the internet is bad for creative people. The internet is not bad for creative people. Web2 is bad for creative people. Spotify, I just saw the staff the other day. Spotify advertises the stat. They have 8 million artists, 14,000 of them make 50,000 a year. The rest make less than”

    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

  9. “Yeah, obviously I'm very excited. I think that there, look, I think there are very, very broad, what I would call primitive. Primitive, just so you understand, like the way we kind of use it is there's these kind of key building, foundational building blocks of the internet. And I think that most of the issues that developed were some of the things I talked about earlier about how you could only, you were limited in what you could build using open methods. And a lot of the problems, frankly, I think, come from advertising. The fact that we didn't have native payments and tokens and all these things we now have, what Google wanted to do, they wanted to have a digital closed loop. And a digital closed loop prior to crypto, you could really only do that with advertising. And so we built this giant infrastructure. The internet now is powered by banner ads and search ads and things like this. And that has been great for a few companies. It's generally been really, really bad for creative people. Someone had a great tweet yesterday. The Web2 companies convinced you to give away your creations in exchange for little hearts. But yeah, tell me about how NFTs...”

    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

  10. “Yeah, I mean, right, board apes, I think that the recent drop they did with the mutant apes, so they did this thing where you got like a potion and you could get kind of your mutant counterpart. I think they made $100 million. As far as I know, they haven't raised venture capital. And they made $100 million on that one drop. So certainly, yes, it's a different economic model. They take it farther where you get the commercial rights. The next stage which people are playing around with now is to actually have the community create narratives. And so, for example, WATPAD, you know, these kind of fan fit community. Imagine the next Harry Potter, the future Harry Potter, is owned by the NFT holders. And they get to decide, they get to write all sorts of interesting fiction, and then they get to vote and decide what becomes Canon and what is not. Imagine the passion people have for Star Wars and all these other kinds of communities. And now imagine they own a piece of it and they control a piece of it. It's about to get really, really interesting. I don't think there's even this much creative kind of energy since the 90s. I don't think mobile compares to 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

  11. “So, a lot of the tech industry today is take open source software, add a little bit of extra proprietary software on top, and then instantiate it, run it, and then charge for it. It's software as a service. And that's great. And they provide value, and they should make money from that. But the kind of key thing driving underneath is this composability of open source software. And now we're going to extend that to this new area.”

    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

  12. “99.9% of the code in the world is open source software that runs. So every server you talk to on the data center, that's almost all Linux. Your Android phone is Linux. Most of the software on your iPhone is open source. How did open source win? It's composability is what Naval said. You only have to solve each problem once. Once you solve a problem, just go on GitHub and fork it and reuse the code. What Web3 is doing is taking that level of rapid innovation and applying it to web services in addition to just software. The one thing software couldn't do is it couldn't run itself. It relied on a company to run 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

  13. “That was great. I think I like to say that composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance, right? It's sort of this magical thing. You get it going, it has a sort of exponential hockey stick. I Said, I think one thing people who aren't in the tech business may underestimate is how dominant open source software is. So open source software went from a curiosity in the 90s. I happened to be watching a thing about Microsoft in 1999 in the antitrust case. The word Linux doesn't come up. It's all Java. Of course, what actually happened is Linux is the thing that...”

    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

  14. “Some things is like tech bro's money, this and that. It's so misunderstood and it's so important, which is why I get fired up about it because I feel like if people like me and Naval don't explain this, that I think it's a very important thing, I guess I'll say.”

    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

  15. “Be done this way. One is it's better because wouldn't it be better if the drivers on the Uber network owned Uber and got to participate more in the value creation and also in the control and governance of that system? I think that's clearly a better thing for society. And I also think it's just going to be a winning product. If you look at people in these Web3 communities, no Web3 company, no crypto company has ever spent a dollar on marketing, including Coinbase. I was on the board for years, no marketing. Why? Tokens are self-marketing. When somebody owns something and feels skin in the game, they want to go talk about it. They want to evangelize it. I think Web3 is not only better for the world, but it's also going to beat Web2 because it's going to be more popular because the people get really excited when they actually get to participate. The internet is 100% the most important invention of the century. I don't think that's hyperbolic to say that. And we're literally talking about how is money and power going to flow on the internet. This is such an important issue. And yet it's caricatured in the press.”

    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

  16. “Are so important they now provide a mechanism by which value and control can be given to users and builders as opposed to simply to centralized companies. So you can build today there are two things. One is, remember before I said the functionality wasn't quite there for the open side in Web2, it's now there. You can now build something that looks and feels like Facebook or Twitter using open protocols and using this new kind of philosophy where the value and control accrues to the users of the network not to a company because there is no company. And you're going to see more and more things, products launched like this where there is initially there'll be some kind of R&D organization that helps create these protocols, but over time they go away in the same way that there is no Bitcoin company and the Ethereum has a nonprofit foundation that supports R&D, but there is no Ethereum company. And this is how I believe the most important internet products will be created in the future is through this kind of new means.”

    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

  17. “Computer. It's funny. This is the most controversial thing I've said on Twitter. I got this huge when I said blockchains are computer. They are computers. And literally, if you go look at Alan Turing's on computability paper or Von Neumann or any of the great computer scientists, a computer is something you write code and it can store things. Ethereum has almost turned complete programming language and can store information. It's a virtual computer, a computer that runs on a network of physical computers, which is I think what kind of trips people up, but it's a computer. It's a very powerful computer that has new properties that prior kinds of computers didn't have. And one of the things you can do on these is you can create these things called smart contracts, which are code that will continue to run in a certain way. And you can also create these things called tokens. Tokens can be fungible, like kind of quote cryptocurrencies are, or it can be non-fungible NFTs. And it can be something like, which I think some people have heard about now, which are things that can be represented by a piece of media, for example. You're buying this collectible basketball card or this collectible work of art, things like that.”

    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

  18. “Everyone tried to kind of reuse domain names, essentially. Domain names in the earlier thing you can really own on the internet is your domain name. You control it. And so the open side kept trying to kind of use the domain name again and again, but it costs $8. You have to go set it up. It was very technical. Meanwhile, you go to Twitter and it's like three clicks and you choose your name and you're in and your friends are there. And then mobile phones came along and the whole thing accelerated. And here we are now with five plus companies that kind of control the internet. So Web3 is coming along. And so Web3 is my definition is it's an internet owned by users and builders orchestrated with tokens. So this new concept of a token is kind of the key concept of Web3. This comes sort of historically from the movement that started with Bitcoin, although I think it's sort of a different branch of the genealogy or something. And a lot of the stuff's actually built on a different crypto network called Ethereum. And then there are other kind of alternatives to it. The big kind of innovation with Ethereum was it's fully programmable.”

    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

  19. “Details, the close away is one. And a lot of it had to do with the ease of use. The way I think about it is Web 2. The open protocols were just limited in what they could do. So if you wanted to set up a website in 2008, let's say, and you wanted to have sort of simulate the function”

    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

  20. “On the platform that they know they can trust. And so that was what was so great about that first year of the web and why you had so much incredible innovation and investment. And it was, I think most people would agree today, that was sort of a golden period of innovation. But the products were limited in the sense that it tended to be, I call it schemorphic, where people were taking things from the offline world like magazines and putting them on the internet. You go back and look at the 90s web. It was very much experienced like a magazine. You didn't have things like social networks and user-generated content to nearly the same degree. That started really kind of percolating this year. People call Web2. Let's call it around 2005. And at that time, you had sort of two competing models. Let's just take Twitter. There was an open protocol called RSS that was the obvious thing to compete with Twitter. I mean, it's still around, but it's not nearly as popular as Twitter and Facebook and everything else. And so there were sort of open ways to build social networks in the 2000s. And then they were closed ways to build them. And for a variety of reasons, I won't go into all the details.”

    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

  21. “Way I think about it is web one, the internet, of course, existed before the 90s, but the web, sort of this killer app on top of the internet, was created in 1990. And so I sort of think of Web1 as let's call it 1990 to 2005. The key thing with Web1 is it was dominated by open protocol. So the web has a protocol called HTTP. Email has a protocol called SMTP. These were the platforms you were building on then. So if you were Larry and Sergei and you were building Google, you were building it on top of HTTP, on top of the web. And the web was open, which means no one controlled it. And what that means from Larry and Sergei's point of view is they knew if they built a successful product, a successful search engine, they would own it and they would control it. And you couldn't have somebody come along and say, I'm going to take 50% or I'm going to shut you down. It's the web. It was open. And similar to, let's say, in economics, if you talk to an entrepreneur or an investor, they'll say they like to invest in countries with predictable rule of law. They don't like countries where the government seizes the assets and things like this. It's the same thing happens with startups and entrepreneurs. They want to build...”

    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

  22. “And so that's what Bitcoin actually, from my vantage point back then, it was like, oh wow, HashCash been stored. And that was actually what got me initially interested in. Then I started going down the rabbit hole, as we say. You'll hear this phrase a lot from crypto people because it's very much this looking glass experience where the outside narrative is just so incredibly not accurate about Web3. And once you go and learn it yourself, I get an email now. Naval's probably getting this too every day now from a Web2 person, a good entrepreneur saying, oh my God, I didn't understand what this was. And now that I do, it's like completely changed my life. It's a transformative thing when you go down that rabbit hole. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole, although it wasn't as deep a rabbit hole back then, but I think probably I'm guessing the ball had a similar experience.”

    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

  23. “Million emails, spammers will just do that. And so one idea that went back really back to the, I think the 90s was idea of charging somebody a little bit to send an email. But then how do you do that when you don't have native internet money? And so the idea was you forced them to do a computation. And I actually had looked at commercializing this at one point. I didn't do it because I couldn't figure out the whole thing. When I first saw Bitcoin, I'm like, oh, it's stored hash cash. Adam Smith called capital is stored labor.”

    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

  24. “A lot of these things have started with, I think, friends Naval could have been part of that. Fred Wilson, their sort of early group of people that were kind of getting interested in Bitcoin. I used to be technical. I'm not particularly technical now, but I went and used Bitcoin. And I was particularly interested in the programming language around it, which I can talk more about. Now we have platforms like Ethereum with much more robust programming abilities. So I went and kind of used it. And the idea, I have to say, it appealed to me initially. I had come from, actually the first thought, actually, because he used this thing called hash cache. So hash cache is the algorithm that's used for Bitcoin mining, what's called mining, which is a way to incentivize the people to run their computer and run part of the Bitcoin network. I started a computer security company in 2004 and it actually looked at using hash cash. The hash cache had been talked about for a long time as a way to fight internet spam. And this is what I was working on. The idea was, why do you have spam? It's a tragedy, the commons problem where because it costs zero to send an email, if you can make $100 every...”

    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

  25. “Graphics thing today, Apple, Pixar, Tari. The best venture capital strategy in the 1970s would be to take a big bag of money and hand it out to the University of Utah. Because the entire future of computer graphics was the University of Utah. Why? Because I forgot the specifics. Some donor liked computer graphics and gave money. And they're all there. I always think about it, like, I do venture capital. I can sit there, analyze. It's in a Discord. It's in a Reddit. A lot of what I did in that list I had in 2013, a lot of that came from Reddit.”

    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

  26. “They're very good at execution, but typically it's extrapolation execution. Like we have this computer here, let's make a better next version of it or something like that. And this is sort of Clay Christensen's idea, the idea of disruptive innovation is that these things come from below. They look like toys. It's another kind of common theme. They come from below. They look silly. The serious people poo-poo it. It's not a serious thing. Some of those things, by the way, that people are into the hobbyist things, they just stay hobbyists. A lot of it depends on the nature of the specific topic and is it going to follow some kind of exponential improvement curve and things like that? Because the PC, of course, was writing Moore's Law and a bunch of other important trends in a way that other fringe hobbies of the time weren't. So I've always found this to be a small group of very smart cultish people to be very, very interesting pattern. And one thing I do a lot of, I've read a lot of history books, particularly history of innovation. And this pattern happens over and over. So I'll give you an example. Another example I like to use is University of Utah in the 1970s. Every single computer”

    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

  27. “Goes back to the lore of Silicon Valley of the hackers in the garage and Steve Jobs and Wozniak going to the homebrew computer club. It was like this fringe cultish club at the time in the era of mainframe computers and things. It basically came back to this idea that maybe that's not a coincidence that this keeps happening, that it's these things people are doing on the weekend, and particularly they're smart people. You go and you talk to them, they had a good reason. They really understood what a personal computer could be. They had very deep thinking. So by the way, a lot of this involves actually going and speaking to people and not trusting secondary sources. I really believe very, very strongly that one of the most important things here you can do is just go speak to a lot of people. That's where I get all of my information talking to entrepreneurs, talking to people that are smarter than me. Why was personal computing happening at the homebrew computer club and not at, let's say, IBM at the time? Once a company gets to a certain scale, it's managed by business people and business people plan on a one to three year horizon.”

    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

  28. “Like seven pages. I think I have it on my wall, actually, in my other office. I have it on the wall, and it literally fits on a poster. So I believe the PDF depends on the format. You can get them in printed Bible-like formats, or you can get them as a PDF. I think the PDF seven page. Yeah, no, it's very short. It's very short and actually probably two-thirds of it is implementation details. The core ideas are probably... Similar to the Bible, there was a whole long period of forum posts and other kinds of things flushing it out. And then the actual code. The concept of a blockchain is, I think, one of the beautiful computing primitives that a lot of those beautiful simple things is relatively simple at his core.”

    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

  29. “The other thing me and my friends had this idea that look, the best philosophy paper at the end of the PhD write a dissertation, we came to the conclusion that the best dissertation would be two pages long and have no footnotes. And that was just completely unacceptable in modern academia. So we were like, there's no way that we can do what actually considered to be a great because truly great philosophy is just a brand new idea, a brand new set of ideas. Not that I had them. I'm not claiming I was a great philosopher, but if the goal was fundamentally inconsistent with the nature of the program, it was probably not just practical for me.”

    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

  30. “Philosophy books I highly recommend. And I had the opportunity to talk to him, and that was the point at which I was thinking about quitting and doing what I do now, basically startups. And he said to me, he said, look, if you think you're going to be like a great philosopher and that's all you can ever do, you should do it. Otherwise, I would quit immediately. And go do something else. I just knew like I was going to be a mediocre philosopher working on footnotes. Basically, in these kinds of academic fields, there's like five people that matter every century. And then everyone else is sort of doing footnote cleanup.”

    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

  31. “You could have a group of people working on something. There was this great quote I started the essay with. It was this computer scientist who said, if you went in 1905 and tried to find the least practical area of philosophy or any academic field you could, it would be this set of logicians like Bertrand Russell and Kirk Gerdel and a bunch of other people like that who were doing these really, really esoteric logical things. But it turned out that was literally the direct lineage into Alan Turing and von Neumann and all the great papers that came out in the 30s and then that culminated in World War II. So literally the history of computing came from just kind of crazy group of like 10 people in 1905. And so it was that kind of stuff that I was into reading about that kind of stuff. And the fun thing with philosophies, you can say, hey, this semester, I'm going to do science and this semester I'm going to do math. So it's really just a little bit dilettantish or something. Like it's just sort of a fun excuse to go read a lot of smart people. But yeah, but then at one point this is a guy named Daniel Dennon who's sort of one of my heroes who's written a lot of great philosophy books going to pop”

    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

  32. “Back in college, I'm sort of interested in computers my whole life, and I read this book Gerdel Escherbach, which was sort of a mind-blowing book at the time. And it's all about kind of the connections between computer science and music and philosophy and things like this. And so when I got to college, I said, you know, I started taking some philosophy classes and really kind of went down this rabbit hole of philosophy and actually was at one point in a PhD program until I dropped out. I was very interested in what's known as analytic philosophy. language, mind, logic, the foundations of mathematics. It's still an area I'm interested in sort of the history of ideas, I'd say the history of science, the history of mathematics, how it happened. I by no means consider myself a philosophy expert, and I haven't read that much over the years. But I have, for example, a couple of years ago, I went and did this whole really big deep dive into the history of logic and computer science and actually ended up writing this article for the Atlantic about it. And kind of my argument was, which is still kind of my main area of interest, is this idea that”

    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