Podcast Notes Playlist: Latest Episodes

XKCD is one of our favorite webcomics - and it started out as doodles in Randall Munroe's college notebooks. Munroe describes his work as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” In this episode, he joins Kevin to talk about how he got started, where his inspiration comes from and his latest book, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Find out why a surprising number of cartoonists are physicists by training, explore the joy of seeking answers to seemingly impossible questions, and much more! 

Brian is the Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency company on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world. He is also a Co-founder of NewLimit, a biotechnology company working to radically extend human healthspan, and ResearchHub, which is aiming to accelerate the pace of scientific research. In 2018, Brian launched a nonprofit called GiveCrypto.org and signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give the majority of his wealth to charitable causes throughout his lifetime. Follow Brian on Twitter @brian_armstrong.

[2:18] - Brian's origin story

[9:33] - Reflections on his early career and how it prepared him to start Coinbase

[16:02] - Coinbase’s mission to increase economic freedom in the world, and why economic freedom is important

[23:34] - The challenges of building through crypto's hype cycles and scaling Coinbase at a rapid pace

[31:08] - An introduction to The RAPID Decision-Making Framework

[35:36] - How years of experience with remote employees helped Coinbase become a remote-first company

[45:24] - Repeatable innovation and the rationale for Coinbase’s 70/20/10 strategy for resource allocation

[54:34] - Coinbase’s contrarian decision to work with regulators from the beginning, and how it is increasingly leaning in on decentralization

[1:03:38] - Extending the human healthspan, an overview of NewLimit, and epigenetic reprogramming

[1:15:25] - Prioritizing "new media" over mainstream media

[1:21:12] - How ResearchHub can enable more open science and help build a bridge from scientific research to commercial products

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Ed Latimore is a former heavyweight boxer, best-selling author, and chess enthusiast. 

In this conversation, we discuss the crackhead work theory, Ed's recovery from alcohol addiction, why the world has gone so crazy, critical thinking, and narrative violations in recent years.

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Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.

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The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC.WORLD and SiGMA.WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA!

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Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. 

For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com

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• The United States does not have a great history of exporting things to countries before conflicts happen 
• “The big defense primes are not in the position to build the right things, partly because the government has created the wrong incentives for them to do so.” – Palmer Luckey
• “The point of high-end defense technology is not to win a war that has already started; it’s to deter that war from happening, to make the cost of engaging in that war so high that it never happens.” – Palmer Luckey 
• “The real reason that these tech companies were not doing work with the United States military, or foreign allied militaries, was that they were afraid of upsetting China.” – Palmer Luckey 
• Until Anduril became the third unicorn in 2019, there were only two unicorns in the defense industry since the Cold War: Palantir and SpaceX
• It took billionaire-founders with previous success starting companies for venture capitalists to invest in the defense industry 
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced many venture capitalists to reconsider their assumptions about investing in defense tech 
• Some countries are willing to do irrational things that disrupt their economic relationships with other countries; irrational wars and conflicts are prevalent throughout history 
• “I think the odds of a direct, hot war between the U.S and China are very very low. I think the odds of a proxy conflict over minerals in South America, South Africa, or Southeast Asia are quite high.” – Palmer Luckey 
• Anduril is the answer to the question: “What would a next-generation Lockheed Martin look like?”
• Without giving away Anduril’s entire roadmap, the future of defense will have a lot of autonomous things across air, land, sea, subsea, and space all working together
• Palmer is more concerned about evil people using very basic AI than extremely advanced AI taking over the world in a Skynet scenario 
• The U.S. must be involved in the technology (nuclear, autonomous weapons, etc.) if it wants to lead and potentially regulate how those technologies are used in the rest of the world 
• “I want to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year while we [Anduril] make tens of billions of dollars a year.” – Palmer Luckey 

In this live interview with Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey - joined by Anduril Chief Engineer Shane Arnott - we look at the future of defense, geopolitics, and Australia's future in a transformed Indo-Pacific region. Have we shifted toward a defense-driven future? For more information about this and all our other Next Billion Seconds content, please check out https://nextbillionseconds.com

Mark Pesce - The Next Billion Seconds is produced by Ampel - visit https://ampel.com.au to find out what Ampel could do for you! If you are interested in sponsoring The Next Billion Seconds podcast, reach out to our Director of Media and Partnerships Lauren Deighton at [email protected] If you enjoyed this show, please leave a rating and/or review on Apple, Spotify or any other podcast platform. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• Have a vector that orients your time, attention, and energy towards achieving your goal, and allow for subroutines to develop off of that vector that get you closer to your goal 
• Design an information diet like you would design your diet with food: this information is good, this information is bad, don’t consume this type of information, only consume this type of media during this specific time of day, etc. 
• Failing restaurants add sugar to their meals as a last-ditch effort to attract patrons back to their restaurant, and the legacy media does the same with information 
• Twitter is the public war zone; it is the new parliament where ideas are shared and challenged, and it’s actually upstream of governments 
  • You can learn a lot from Twitter by following interesting people and accounts, but it is easy to overdose on the serendipity of it 
• “What thesmartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years.” – Chris Dixon
• Technologies that Balaji is interested in today: digital nomadism, a “full crypto life”, AI content creation, and synthesis search engines
• Wars fought today will not look like wars fought in the past; they will include terrorism, social media memes, hacks, de-platforming, assassination, and more
  • The new form of war is better because it’s less destructive to property, but it’s worse because the battlefield is everywhere and nowhere 
• America’s conflict won’t be blue vs. red, it will be green vs. orange, or at a higher level: centralization vs. decentralization 
• “I am not very confident in America’s hard power in a serious fight with China in its own backyard because America is overconfident.” – Balaji Srinivasan 
• Russia cannot give up on Ukraine; China cannot give up on Taiwan; America can and probably will give up on Ukraine and Taiwan like it gave up on Afghanistan 
• The resolution of the government’s war with Big Tech is to effectively nationalize Big Tech, regardless of the justification, and it will justify its measures in the name of combatting Chinese Control
• Choosing betweenAmerican Anarchy and Chinese Control is not ideal for most countries or most people 
• The Cold War had a “third world” consisting of non-aligned countries with neither the U.S. nor the Soviets, but it was significantly behind the U.S. and Soviet blocs
  • Balaji thinks a third group could emerge in the America-China conflict, but perhaps this time, it comes in first because of the modern technologies that empower the individual 

Balaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur and essayist, he was co-founder of Counsyl, former chief technology officer of Coinbase and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Our information diets are making us mentally fat. Whether it's fake news, mis or disinformation, state propaganda or conspiracy theories, the world is very difficult to navigate. Balaji also wants to start a new type of country, he has views on how to optimise your working day and he generates more new ideas than almost anyone. Today we get an insight into his thought process behind all of this.

Expect to learn why socialism always continues to arise across the world, how Balaji tracks all of the ideas he has in his head, why Singapore is a powerhouse of a new country, how immigration will deal with remote VR workers in India, why everyone should use a dashboard to track what's going on in their life, the key trick that the legacy media uses to manipulate you and much more...

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Extra Stuff:

Read The Network State - https://thenetworkstate.com/ 

Check out Balaji's website - https://balajis.com/ 

Follow Balaji on Twitter - https://twitter.com/balajis 

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