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Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life
A highlight from The Professors Disillusionment
"Welcome to Gospel in Life. This month we're looking at directional signposts through history that point us to Christ. All through the Old Testament from Genesis to Jonah, you see signs that point us to Jesus. Listen now to today's teaching from Tim Keller on Pointers to Christ. Verses 15 to 26. Then I thought in my heart, The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? I said in my heart, This too is meaningless. For the wise man, like the fool, will not long be remembered. In days to come both will be forgotten. Like the fool, the wise must die. So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all the things that I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge, and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days, his work is pain and grief. Even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless. A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God. For without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and happiness. But to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after, the win. This is God's word. one Now, of the things that an awful lot of people have said is that Ecclesiastes is a great book. In chapter 97 of Moby Dick, I know it so well, Melville says the truest of all books is Ecclesiastes. Thomas Wolfe in a pretty well -known American novel, You Can't Go Home Again, he says, one of his characters says this, Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, the noblest, the wisest, the most powerful expression of humanity's life on earth, the highest flower of eloquence and truth. There's an awful lot of people who talk like that, say this is the best book in the Bible, this is the truest, this is the greatest. But I can almost guarantee you that none of them felt that way the first time, not the first time they read it. Because what you have when you first read Ecclesiastes, what you're struck with, is a teacher, a professor, as we'll see, in absolute despair. The very first verses, the first few lines of Ecclesiastes go like this, meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless. And of course, the passage I just read is just the same. And so you have someone in utter despair with the bleakest view of life, and the reason people generally get very confused when they read it, people who are believers, people who believe in God, people who have the traditional faith, they say, I'm confused because it seems like he's contradicting everything the rest of the Bible says. And people who don't believe or have trouble believing or who are not as believing, when they read it, I'll tell you what they say. What they say is, who needs this? They say, this guy is a professor, this is the kind of guy who drinks himself into a raise on the left bank talking about the meaninglessness of life, this is the kind of guy who makes these art films that, you know, are so bleak and terrible that play in obscure little corners of Greenwich Village. Of course, the world has people like that, but most of us aren't like that, we don't see life like that. Who needs this rant? Who needs this pessimism? Now, the reason why it's so confusing is because a couple of things are missed. The first thing is because people don't realize the instructional approach. We don't exactly know who wrote Ecclesiastes, I won't get into the debate, it's debatable that Solomon writes, it doesn't matter because in the very first line, he calls himself a teacher, a word that can mean a professor. And if you read Ecclesiastes, you'll realize that this man, and it's the only book like this in the Bible, this man is running a seminar. He's not lecturing, he's not preaching, like a good philosophy professor, he's running a seminar. He is making you think. He is goading you with questions. Ecclesiastes, unlike any other book of the Bible, is not pedagogy, it's andragogy. Pedagogy literally means child instruction, memorizing, wrote, you see, drill, spoon feeding. Andragogy is a word that means adult instruction. Goading, asking questions, getting people to look at their own foundations, discovering truth for themselves. That's one of the reasons why Ecclesiastes seems so odd. But the other reason it seems so odd is because people, I don't think notice, unless you look clearly and I'm going to try to show you this morning, that the teacher is looking at life all the time. He's always saying, I see, I see, I saw this, I looked at life and I saw this, but he looks at life in two different ways and he goes back and forth between them. Let me show you the first way he looks at life and the second way he looks at life. It'll teach us a great deal. The first way he looks at life, in the first view, let's say how he looks and what he sees and why he sees it. Now, the first way he looks at life is he looks at life under the sun. You notice how three times in this passage, verse 17, 20 and 22, he says, I found this meaningless under the sun. I saw all my work under the sun was meaningless. This is a term that's used 30 times in the book. This is a term that is not used anywhere else in the Old Testament, so it's clearly critical to and very important to the whole book. And what he means by this, almost all the commentators I've ever read agree, what he means by under the sun is life here and now considered in isolation from anything else. Life under the sun is, he says, I'm going to look at the world as if this life under the sun is all that there is. I'm not going to look at life above the sun. I'm not going to think about God or eternity or heaven or hell, see. I'm not going to think of anything beyond. I'm going to look at life as if this is the only life we have, at least the only life we know. You know Carl Sagan in the beginning of every one of his Cosmos PBS segments, in the very beginning you'd hear Carl Sagan's voice come on and he would say, the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Now most people are not atheists in the strict sense like Carl Sagan. What Carl Sagan is saying is, this life, this world, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no eternity, okay? There is nothing but this life, life under the sun, there's nothing else. Most people aren't atheists. Most people would say, well, I believe in God, but the modern person says, I believe in God or something, but we can't know. We can't know God's will for sure. We can't know about the after. We can't be sure. And so essentially the modern person says, we have got to live life as if this is the only life we know. And the teacher says, deal. I'm going to look at life as if it's the only life we know. That's how he's looking at it. That's the first way he looks at it. I'm going to look at life under the sun. But what does he see? What he sees is absolute inconsequentiality. Now, he kind of looks at it in several ways. He notices the injustice. If you look down, he says, it's unjust. Some people work very, very hard and never enjoy the fruit of their labor, and other people who don't deserve it at all enjoy it. And then he says, and worse than that, it's possible that you could work very hard to accomplish something in life, and then when you die, not only don't you get it anymore, but some fool comes along and takes over, and next thing you know, everything you've worked for is gone. You build an institution. You establish a school of thought. You do some good deeds, and somebody else comes along afterwards and just ruins it. But you see, that all is just, those are all just symptoms. Because up in verse 15 and 16, he really gives you the bottom line. In verse 15 and 16, as I read, he says, the fate of the fool will overtake me also. He says, therefore, this is meaningless, for the wise like the fool will not long be remembered. Now what he's bringing out here is something, again, incredibly modern, but something he's trying to grab you by the scruff of the neck and show you. And we're going to talk about why, but for now, let's say the what. We'll talk about why he's doing this, but right now, let's say what he's looking at. And what he is saying is, a wise life, a wise action, or a foolish life, a foolish action, a compassionate life, a compassionate action, a cruel life, a vicious action. In the end, makes no difference at all. None at all. If it's really true that life under the sun is all there is, if it's really true that when we die, that's it, and eventually the solar system dies, in other words, eventually something will sweep everything away, civilization will all be swept away, it won't make a bit of difference how you've lived at all. And therefore, there is no way, if you realize that life under the sun is all there is, that you can say one action is more significant than another, because it makes no difference in the end at all. Now, that's very bleak, you say. And the question comes up, why, you know, we're all smart people, we walk around, why is it that the average person, and the average person in Western culture who shares the teacher's premise that this life is all we know, but they go on out there and they don't feel that life is meaningless, they don't say one thing is as insignificant as another, that everything is ridiculous, everything is meaningless and vain and futile, no. So why does he, and here's the reason why. He looks at the whole of life, the big picture, and we refuse to. The key is, take a look at this question that he brings out, I have been meditating on this question for some years, and I just saw something this week that I'd never seen before. Here's the question he asks, and he dares you to ask the question. He says, down here in verse 22, what does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? That's the question. Every word is significant. First of all, he says, assuming that this life is all there is, first of all, he says, what is the gain? What do you get? What is the difference? Now, why do you ask that question? Because he's really showing us that you ask that question about any individual piece of your life, do you not? If somebody says to you, I would like you to go to the corner of so -and -so place, and I would like you to stand there for an hour tomorrow, you would say, for what? Well, the person says, I don't want to tell you, I'd just like you to do it. And you say, no, no, no, no. I want to know what difference it'll make, what gain there will be, otherwise it's a waste of time. You would never do anything. If it made absolutely no difference at all, if nothing came of it at all, you'd never do anything. But the thing that, in other words, we look at every part of our life like that. But the reason that the teacher comes to despair, existential despair, is because he uses a little word in that question that is so critical, and that is the word all. What do you get from the whole of your life? And the reason the average person shares the teacher's premise but does not share the teacher's despair in this world, in this Western culture, is because we refuse to use the word all. See, the average person, I mean, there's probably a lot of people right here listening to this, and you're going to sit through the 30 minutes or whatever, but you would never sit through 30 minutes personally with somebody. If somebody sat down and said, well, what do you believe about life? And you said, well, I'm kind of an agnostic, I'm kind of a, I sort of believe in God in general, it might be true, but the one thing is all we know is that we're here, we don't really know for sure why we're here or where we're going or, you know, we can't be sure. Now, the person says, well, in that case, you must, you have to look at life and say that nothing means anything, that there's no right and wrong ultimately, there's no significance between one action over another, that no one action is more meaningful or more significant than the other. And you wouldn't stand for that. You would say, oh, give me this, I took philosophy 101, this meaning in life, so philosophers need this, philosophers ask the big questions. The average person, the average person lives for the daily things. Sure, I don't know, I'm an agnostic, but I'm optimistic about life, why? Because when I take a boat ride in Central Park, I feel good, it's meaningful. When I hug somebody I love, it's meaningful. When accomplish I something at work, it's meaningful. When I do a compassionate deed as opposed to a selfish deed, it's meaningful to me. I'm having a fine life. You can't throw all this on me, you can't put me back into philosophy class. Now, you know what you're doing? You're refusing to ask the word all. There was an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon some years ago. Remember Mutt and Jeff? And at one place, Mutt, Jeff comes up and there's Mutt, and right in the middle of a street, right in the middle of a, you know, a road, a street, he has built a very, very tall pile of stones, and at the top of the pile of stones, there's a lantern, and Jeff says to Mutt, oh, Mutt, why did you build this pile of stones? Oh, he says, that's easy, so I could put the lantern up there. So that it's up high so that it gives a lot of light. Oh, okay. Why did you put the lantern up there? Well, I want the lantern up there so the cars will see the pile of stones and they won't crash into it. Why did you put the pile of stones there for the car to crash into? Well, so that I could put the lantern up there. Now, what is he doing? It's very simple. He's finding meaning of one part in the meaning of another part, but he's refusing to ask the question, does the whole thing have any use, or is it just stupid? Why do you work? Usually, a person says, I'll tell you why I work, so that I can do things that I like to do. I have avocations, I've got hobbies, I've got leisure, I like travel. Why? Well, that really recharges my batteries. Why? So I can work. See, the lantern is for the stones, the stones are for the lantern, and if you refuse to stand back and say, but what is the whole thing for? What is the whole thing for? How do you know your whole life isn't stupid? That your whole life isn't pointless? How do you know your whole life is not just a very, very large stone lantern in the middle of a highway? How do you know this? Now, here's what the teacher is saying. The teacher is saying, grow up. This is not pedagogy, this is andragogy. Don't be an ostrich. Ask yourself the question. If you would never do one thing, if it made no difference at all, okay, it would be meaningless, it would be a waste of time, unless it made a difference. What difference does your whole life make? What are you living for? What difference does it all make? Now, the average person just does not want to hear this. I had a little conversation with somebody, by the way, I know very well, I'll get back to why I think this was a valid conversation, but it's a dangerous one. I had a conversation not too long with somebody I knew very, very well, and this person had just said, what he said was, he says, you know what, the way you know what's right and wrong is, there's no reasons for it, there's no way to know what's right and wrong, you just have to know what's right and wrong in your heart, and if you know in your heart, then it's right, and then you just need to do it, and that's how you live, that's how you find meaning in life. And I said, well then, what do you say to Hitler? He felt it real hard in his life, and he did it, so that was okay. Oh no, my friend said, well you know, he says, the trouble is, most of the people's hearts in the world know that what Hitler was doing was wrong, therefore it was wrong. And I said, well you know, up to 150 years ago, most of the hearts of the world thought slavery was just fine. Do you think slavery was just fine? No. Why not? And he just looked and he shrugged and he says, you know, these things are so complex, if you think about this, you'll just dig a hole. Now this is a person I knew a very long time, and it was very, very cordial. Now here's the question. The teacher is saying, when someone says, I don't need to ask this question, I don't need to ask this question, what you really are saying is, my optimistic agnosticism, and that's the worldview the teacher is trying to absolutely smash, my optimistic agnosticism will fall apart if I ask that question. It can't deal with that question. It is demolished by that question. It is absolutely inadequate to that question. Optimistic agnosticism. Life under the sun is all there is, but there's moral truth. There's human rights. There's human dignity. Listen, if your origin isn't significant, you come from nothing, and if your destiny is insignificant, you're going to nothing, have the guts to admit that your life is insignificant. And stop talking, as if, on the one hand, you feel like you can poke holes in other people's inconsistencies. You'll poke holes in Muslims who say, I believe in God, but then they do something wrong, or Christians who say, I believe in God, do something wrong. You'll poke holes in everybody else's inconsistency, but you won't look at your own. You know, Jean -Paul Sartre made a very interesting statement. His most famous essay was right after the war, 1946. He wrote his essay called Existentialism and Humanism, and this is what he said. He says, God does not exist, and we have to face all the consequences of this. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which wants to abolish God with the least possible expense. The existentialist, indeed, thinks it is very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding any values disappears with God. There can be no a priori good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. So nowhere is it written that we must be honest. Nowhere is it written that we must not lie, because the fact is we're on a plane where there's only us, human beings. Dostoevsky said, if God didn't exist, everything would be permissible. That is the very starting point of existentialism. If God does not exist, there is nothing within or without that can legitimize any conduct. Now, you know what is very interesting to me? Sartre took this idea, life under the sun is all there is, and you know what he says? He says, don't talk to me in any way that says that you believe that one kind of conduct is more legitimate than any other kind. One of the things that's come out recently, he died in 1980, one of the things that's come out over the last few years is what a misogynist he was. Jean -Paul Sartre was very bad to women, the women he knew, and he was very misogynist, but you know what? Whenever I read the people who accept his premise about life, and then get very upset about it, if he was alive, he would rise up, and he was only 5 '2", so that's, he would rise up, and he would say, please. He would say, you want to be free. You want to say, I am free to do what I want to do. You want to be free. As far as I know, this life is all there is. I'm not controlled by eternity, by moral absence, by God. I want to be free. Then you have got to have the guts to accept the utter meaninglessness of all distinctions. You want to be free, fine, but you have to accept it. Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless. Come on. You know, Christians look like real hard -nosed skeptics compared to a view that says, life under the sun is all there is, but I'm optimistic. I have meaning in life. I can enjoy things. I know some things are right, some things are wrong. I know it's better to be compassionate than to be violent. I know these things. Talk about blind faith. Talk about naive religiosity. why Now, is he doing this? Because he also tends to see life, the preacher, the teacher, the professor sees life in a different way. One of the biggest obstacles for people to believe in Christianity is that they think they already know all about it. But if we look at Jesus' encounters with various people during His life, we'll find some of our assumptions challenged. We see Him meeting people at the point of their big, unspoken questions. The Gospels are full of encounters that made a profound impact on those who spoke with Jesus. And in His book, Encounters with Jesus, Tim Keller explores how these encounters can still address our questions and doubts today. Encounters with Jesus is our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life reach more people with the amazing love of Christ. Request your copy of Encounters with Jesus today when you give at GospelInLife .com slash give. That's GospelInLife .com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.
Bankless
Fresh update on "building" discussed on Bankless
"The fast case is more SVBs, more Silicon Valley Bank, more Credit Suisse type failures, more big monumental failures that may not be able to be muted by governmental intervention and which may lead to significant financial pain for society, significant political tension, significant international problems because the fundamental promises of the system are not sufficiently backed. And the realization of those promises not being sufficiently backed is a painful realization that if it happens, and if it happens in a way that cannot be managed by governments, will lead people to realize the fragility of the systems in which their value exists, the systems in which their economic life exists. And at that point, a cryptographically guaranteed world, a verifiable web, will be extremely attractive. It will be so attractive that anyone who doesn't cryptographically guarantee your economic relationship with them, anybody who can't verify for you how you relate to your assets in their system, anyone who isn't part of the verifiable web will be at a disadvantage. It will be like not being on the internet. That is the fast case. So the slow case is we keep doing what we're doing, we keep building what we're building, we keep improving how we're improving, and we provide so much value that the industry grows. And I think that type of growth is to the 10 trillion plus world, gradually. The fast case is the very fast adoption of blockchains, oracles, smart contracts, CCIP and so on, for the world to work in a cryptographically guaranteed verifiable way. We understand that. We appreciate that. Because we understand that alternative exists. The reason I believe this is that most people don't know that alternative exists. And the pain for them to want it hasn't happened yet. But if it happens, it exists. And so it's so much better than the alternative. I've not met people that understand the alternative and say, let me go back to the old system. I haven't met those people. So I think it's very clear to me that there just needs to be something that acts as a forcing function to get society into this cryptographically guaranteed superior state. And I think the way the world is structured, unfortunately, there's not as much reality backing things as people would like to believe. And once reality connects with that, our industry will be the way the world works. I am pretty sure about that. Well, Sergei, this has been absolutely fantastic. It's been a pleasure having you and certainly a long time coming. I think the parting message of crypto is inevitable. The only difference is whether it happens fast or it happens slow is a great message to leave listeners with. Thank you so much for joining us on Bankless today. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure being here. Thank you for having me. Bankless Nation, got to remind you, of course, none of this has been financial advice, never is on Bankless. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Now we're on the frontier of banking, it seems like. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
RADCast Outdoors
A highlight from Pack Smarter, Hunt Harder: A Two-Part Series with Mike Kentner
"This episode of RadCast Outdoors is brought to you by PK Lures, Bow Spider, and High Mountain Seasonings. Fish on! Hey! RadCast is on! Hunting, fishing, and everything in between, this is RadCast Outdoors. Here are David Merrill and Patrick Edwards. To get back on point, we've covered quite a bit of it. When you're setting up for these hunts, depending on this, that, and the other thing, what are you doing as far as bow hunt, rifle hunt, ammunition? Are you just taking just one quiver full, or are you taking what... Because there's a lot of weight in the ammo for these things. Archery -wise, I take my one quiver full. I carry a pack of six arrow quiver. That's what I kick in, no matter where, from backcountry mountain goat hunt to antelope alongside the truck. I carry six arrows. You get six tries and you're done. Yeah, if it takes me six tries, I'm going to go back to truck crying. I'm pretty much done. A lot of times I will carry extra arrows in the truck, but I may be miles from the truck at any one point, but I've never yet run into a situation where I've emptied my quiver and not put an animal down, but it could be done. I've seen it done. I just haven't accomplished it yet. And I'm actually the same way. I run a... one is a grouse arrow, so I actually only have four broadheads. I run a five arrow quiver anymore. And by the time we get to that third arrow, it better be done. Now, knock on wood, I haven't got into the fourth one yet. I do sometimes pack an extra broadhead so I could change out that grouse arrow, because I'm tired of wasting broadheads on grouse. And I'll tell you, anytime that we see a grouse when it's seasoned on pause, it's time to put a grouse in the pot for dinner. So that's... I'm glad we're on point there. As far as... say elk hunt or mule deer hunt, you didn't fill your tags and you're going, or you drew something that you're going to go rifle hunt for, how much are you going to plan on packing for your rifle? I normally carry 10 rounds. That's what I... usually four in my gun, and then I put another six in my pocket. If I was going on a multi -day hunt, I may pack a few more, but... Have you ever needed more than that? Really, I've never needed more than that. Usually what's in my gun is... the four in the gun is more than sufficient. There's been a few times I've used a few backup rounds trying to finish something off, but it's most of the time, it's the four rounds in the gun's all I've ever needed. Dan, I'm similar. Once that first arrow flies or that first bullet flies, it's a little bit chaos for a moment. And if that first one didn't go where it's supposed to, it doesn't get better with the second and the third of archery. I've made a marginal first shot and the second great shot, right? It has happened. And same with the rifle. But typically we're trying to make sure that first shot counts, and then the nexters are just tertiary, right? So as far as getting into calls, obviously, dear, you're not packing much, Antelope, you're not packing anything. But elk, what's your go -to stuff to have in your backpack and on your person? I carry an open reed cow call, a bugle tube, I have multiple brands, I have a whole closet full of them because I'm addicted to elk calls, so I don't even, I'm not even brand specific most of the time. And I usually have about eight or nine diaphragms with me at any time, mouth diaphragms and all different tension stretches. So I can reach from more lower growly bugles to higher, get up to the more higher pitch sounds by the different calls that are there. And most of the time I carry two of each because in a good day, a lot of days I'll wear out one reed. I pack four to six for, and I have a few more in the truck and I'll, same thing, I have a couple tensions and I'll wear out one every two or three days, I just, they wear out, they just do. Yeah, you stretch the latex in them, they get stretched out. What are we supposed to do with these things once they are stretched out? Because I'm always tossing them in the fire. Yeah, I get rid of them, they're not, they're no good, no use to me, I just throw them away when they're done, when I'm done with them, but, or let my grandkids use them. Okay. I just wanted to cover some of that, the call stuff specifically. We've gone through optics, obviously shelter. Each one of these items, guys, is going to be specific to your hunt, right? There isn't a hundred percent do all. Now, for the most part, I'm taking the same binos and the same vinyl harness, right? If I'm going to pack a sidearm, I'm taking the same sidearm, elk, deer, antelope, mule deer. I'm using the same broadhead for elk, deer, antelope. A lot of this gear transition, I don't have to buy a whole bunch of different gear, but I retool definitely or re -kit and go from a 18, 22 pound day pack up to a, I think the other day I was at 52 pounds with four days of food, right? But I had the heavy spotter, I had the tripod, I had the sleeping pad. The Hilleberg, it's got a big enough vestibule that you and I could put our packs and bows in the vestibule and sleep in there, but it's still shoulder to shoulder tight. I don't mind if it's nice weather, I'll hang my pack on a tree or something like that. If like when we were mountain goat hunting, there was not really any place to hang stuff. So it's got to come in with you to stay out of the weather and even August in Wyoming hunting mountain goats, you're going to weather some thunderstorms. They just collide over the top of those big ridges and you're in the wide open. There's nothing to hide from them in. Yeah, I can just last week I was on a solo couple day elk trip over in Wyoming and in one of the mountain ranges and every evening you could see it building here at Cummin and I actually, it was about two, three in the afternoon, I went and hid in the tent for 45 minutes because it was torrential bound for and I was out, I was back at camp about noon and elk had shut up about nine o 'clock. So I was just waiting for them to start up in the early afternoon. So those afternoon naps, elk hunting are amazing. I think that's half the reason I go anymore, but I will say that to be able to throw the backpack and bow in the vestibule, crawl in the tent and just wait it out when it's sheets of rain coming down, it's worth it for sure. And if you were trying to bivvy sack it, and that's what I found, I still have a XBG Cabela's bivvy sack in there for a while. I had the sleeping bag and pad inside that. You still really have to set up a tarp unless you want, unless it's really good weather. Yeah. Yeah. If it's just, if it's bluebird sky and you're just going to sleep on the ground, they're okay. If you're in mosquito country, you're still going to have mosquitoes all over your face. I just, guys can scream at me all you want. If you love your bivvy sack, I've had one and I'm just, I'm not a big fan by no means of, I don't think there's any more true security in a tent than a bivvy sack. There's just a little more protection from sideways rain and from wind. You get a lot more space between your bag, between you and the weather. Yeah, I agree. And when you get up and it's drizzling and you got to get dressed, when you sit up in a bivvy bag, it's raining and you got to get dressed in the rain. It's a little demoralizing when you're in your tent and you can open the. I opened the door and cook in the vestibule and can start getting dressed and I can have my rain gear on before I even step out. It's, it makes a little different atmosphere when you can get dressed, quote unquote, indoors before you go outdoors. So definitely your, but when we start adding all these things up weight wise, your kit can really start getting, your backpack gets heavy and yeah, for sure. One thing we didn't talk about that I really liked that Bowspider selling is our pack covers or waterproof backpack covers. They are multi -use, really nice. We have two sizes, but what I've found is if you put that receiver on top of your backpack and then put our ultra lightweight backpack covers over, you can still put the post through the material into your receiver so you can have your backpack waterproofed. If you're running our bow slicker, you can have your bow waterproofed and still have quick access when you're hiking around in the rain and that's actually is pretty handy. It is pretty handy if you're getting into bad weather. So definitely a waterproof backpack cover. If I have my rain jacket and my backpack cover, I'll hunt in some pretty nasty weather before I even put my rain pants on. But I am running gaiters, right? So if the brush is wet, most of the time my legs are still staying pretty dry. Now it's got to be pretty nasty for me to go, all right, it's time to put the rain pants on just because I've got the pit zips on the rain coat. So if I'm hunting with the rain jacket on, I can open those pit zips up and I'm still getting rid of a lot of that moisture humidity. Once I put the rain pants on, it feels a little more, locks in, claustrophobic, I build a lot more heat and sweat and I can't move as fast as far. So certainly that's some of the things I do, you do. It's great that we covered some of the same stuff. Food wise is one of the big things, food prep, food. What are you doing on a multi -day hunt versus a day hunt? Day hunts, I grow mainly with granola bars and sometimes tortillas, peanut butter, a few things like that. I don't carry a lot of heavy food with me. Pound of food, maybe. Pound of food, maybe. A few granola bars, protein bars, stuff like that. Multi -day hunts, I'm usually running granola bars for breakfast, something similar to that lunch time and then dehydrated dinners for whatever brand you prefer, for the dehydrated meals or freeze -dried meals for dinner. I've eaten quite a few of them and there's a bunch out there and I'll ramble through a few of them.
Bloomberg Surveillance
Fresh update on "building" discussed on Bloomberg Surveillance
"The year. Listen on Bloomberg .com. The Bloomberg Business App. And anywhere you get your podcasts. Bloomberg News Now. Context changes everything. Get it, slip it, cup it, check. Nearly one in two US adults have high blood pressure. That's why it's important to self monitor your blood pressure in four easy to remember steps. It starts with a monitor. Be next to talk to your doctor about your blood pressure numbers. Get down with your blood pressure. Self monitoring is power. Visit manager BP dot org brought to you by the Ad Council, the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association in partnership with the Office of Minority Health and Health Resources and Services Administration. Whether you're an in house counsel or in private practice, Bloomberg Law gives you the edge with the latest in AI powered legal analytics, business insights and workflow tools. With guidance from our experts, you'll grasp the latest trends in the legal industry, helping you achieve better results for the practice of law, the business of law, the future of law. The difference is Bloomberg Law. Learn America is strong, and today's investments in essential American infrastructure make it even stronger. Build America Mutual only ensures U .S. municipal bonds, providing an added layer of security to improve any portfolio with guaranteed income that helps investors reach their goals. Be part of building America. Build a better portfolio. Invest in BAM bonds. insured What dedication? is The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Therianim. call We him Day -Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge, and there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my age, that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together, we did a good job. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood .gov. Brought to you by the U .S. Department of Education. Conversation and commercial break, totally out of control. We've got to do Big Lou. said I've it. Oh, I could go. Framo cam. Yeah, well. You've got to take that life. You also had some revealing That's all I can say. Sure. Okay. Not as revealing equities on the S &P unchanged. Let's call it positive. Not even a tenth of one percent up by zero point zero six percent on the Nasdaq up by zero point two five percent on the S &P last month, down
Game of Crimes
A highlight from 118: Part 1: Marc Cameron - From Deputy US Marshal to Arliss Cutter to Tom Clancy
"Well, again, here we are. Episode 118. Murph, we have 118. This is like surviving 118 attempts on our life. We have dodged all the bullets. Our listeners are loyal and they protect us. You guys protect us. So welcome back again. Episode 118, Game of Crimes. Thank you, thank you, thank you guys for joining. I am your host with the most hair. Just got it cut, Morgan Wright, here literally with my partner in crime. Murph, who's almost bald and your hair looks like crap. My hair doesn't look like crap. It looks like crap. No, it doesn't. It looks marvelous. I've got so much. She says, the person who cut my hair said, when you come in after six weeks, it's like most people's eight weeks or 10 weeks. So I get a lot of hair. Hey, when I go in and get a haircut, it takes like three minutes. I'm in and out. There you go. You sure that's a haircut? Be nice now. I'm just starting this. Please, please don't pay attention to him, ladies and gentlemen. I'm sorry, okay. We're trying to gain some professional help. Yeah, whatever. All right, how's that working out for you? Okay, let's just do some quick housekeeping before we get started. Hey guys, head on over to that Apple Spotify. Hit those five stars. It helps us out a lot. Remember, the other thing we learned that too, guess what guys? Not only did Stitcher go away, Google Podcasts is going away. So you're gonna have to, if you're on Google, make sure you pick a new service to keep listening to us. Make sure you hit that subscribe button too so that you do not miss. Deliver to your digital inbox every week on a Monday and Tuesday, these episodes like this one's coming out. Also head on over to our website, gameofcrimespodcast .com. In fact, when we talk about our guest today, Mark Cameron, we'll talk about his book. That'll be listed on there. And we've got a lot of great stuff on there. So make sure you head on over there. Gameofcrimespodcast .com. Also follow us on that thing they call social media at Game of Crimes on Twitter, Game of Crimes podcast on Facebook and the Instagram. But Murph, I'm telling you, we're gonna have some fun on Patreon. Patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. I have a 911 call coming up for you. Of all the 911 calls, I guarantee you nobody, nobody has taken a call like this before that I'm aware of ever, anywhere. Looking forward to hearing this one. Holy cow. There's gonna be a couple. This one, I don't know if I can make an entire case out of it, but I've listened to it. And just the sheer confusion on the call taker, they've never been presented with this before. So we'll have to talk about that. But guys, we just did our warden of the throne. It's a unique little thing we're doing now. Rather than just taking one topic, Murph brings two topics. I bring two topics. We're allowed to get into things that are catching our interest for the previous month or some stories. So we just did one talking about Philadelphia and the looting, Iran, and what they call the Iranian experts initiative. People have had their security clearance suspended. You talk about some tragic cases up in New York, the Bronx, baby dying at daycare center, and the recent death of that CEO by a sexual predator who should have still been in prison, but wasn't. Right, in Baltimore. So those are a lot of good things. We've got Q &A coming up, 911, what's your emergency case of the month? So guys, all good stuff. You don't hear this anywhere else, but on patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. But the other place you gotta be though too, Murph, our favorite mafia queen with the iron fist with the velvet glove. You gotta head on over there, watch what Sandy Salvato is doing with our Game of Crimes fans page. Just go to Facebook, type in Game of Crimes fans, answer a couple easy questions, get admitted to the Inner Sanctum in YouTube. You will see what goes on behind the scenes, behind the curtains. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain because that's one of our favorite people happening over on Game of Crimes fans. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of humor there. A lot of dark humor too. If you saw some of the stuff people have posted, I hope you guys, I hope your healthcare plan supports you with an employee assistance program. I'm telling you. I don't know what you're talking about. Here's what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about now because you know what time it is. Guess what? I'm gonna ask you, do you know what time it is? Guess what time it is? Come on, give me a clue. It's time for Small Town Police Blotter. Hey, this because in honor of our guest that's coming up, Mark Cameron, the author, we'll talk about him in a second, but he went from Texas, lives in Alaska. So I thought we should have an Alaska theme. There you go. For our Small Town Police Blotter. So Murph, gotta ask you. Yes. This comes out of the Alaska Dispatch News. You know, a lot of fishery stuff, a lot of crabbing, a lot of lobster stuff, a lot of that goes on in Alaska, doesn't it? Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. So you have an idea. You go, hey, we're gonna take a crabbing boat and we're gonna convert it into a floating bar and strip club. What could go wrong, right? Oh my gosh. So 54 -year -old Darren Byler of Kodiak and his 46 -year -old wife, Kimberly, own the Wild Alaskan, a former crabbing boat that's been converted into a floating bar and strip club. Apparently it's doing pretty well. They've been running the business since June, but now they're in serious legal trouble and Murph, it's not for stripping. Uh -oh, what is it? This gives new meaning to, you know, why this is on a crabbing boat. So if you're out there floating, you have to provide facilities for people to use, right? So if they use the facilities, number one and number two, you should probably find a way to take care of that other than dumping it into the ocean. Oh, come on, come on. So they were just indicted by a federal grand jury for improper disposal of human waste after they were caught dumping feces from their bathroom into the harbor, as they say in Maine, into the harbor. Instead of taking the waste tanks to the proper places on shore, they both could be facing up to one year in jail and $25 ,000 in fine, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is the Coast Guard said they lied about dumping the tanks, and if they're convicted of that, making false statements to the Coast Guard investigators, that could get them five years in prison and $250 ,000 in fines. Cha -ching. I tell you what, you gotta do a lot of stripping to make that kind of money. It's a shitty situation they got themselves in. It's terrible. This whole thing just stinks. It stinks, man, stinks to high heaven. Tell you what, you know, you had a turd in one hand and wishes in the other. Anyway, we could go lots of places with that, so. These people didn't move to Alaska from Florida, did they? I don't believe so. Thank goodness. Hey, but I went back into the archives too, so I pulled some articles out of the Alaska News Archives, the Fairbanks Daily News Minor. This comes to us January 21st, 1955, and I'm telling you, the stories are hilarious. These are quick hits. And not always, but this is what's in Alaska. This is what's important in Alaska, January of 1955. The Tokyo police hire pretty hostesses. Tokyo police, grieved by complaints that their headquarters is unattractive, have assigned four pretty girls to meet people at the building's two entrances. Officials have also ordered the women to take charm courses. That is what's important in the Alaska, you know, the Fairbanks Daily News Minor. The other thing you gotta do here, be prepared. And this comes to us, it's out of Tucson, Arizona, but in the Fairbanks Daily News Minor. This is 1955, a 15 -year -old boy with a loaded .38 caliber pistol in his waistband was removed from high school class here by police. His explanation for carrying a gun, a couple of those teachers were giving me a hard time. Well, geez, okay. Okay, but this one though, this one has gotta be, this is it. This is St. Monaface. I believe this is Alaska, no, Manitoba. This is St. Monaface, Manitoba. All right. Police were certain the worst of the winter is upon them. Pete Nikoluk has started his annual jail term for vagrancy. Nikoluk has spent the past 21 winters in jail on vagrancy charges. Police says he always manages to get arrested just before the coldest part of the winter sets in. Who says this guy's not smart? Three hots and a cot, and I get through the toughest part of winter. Oh my goodness. That's, well, you know, that's prior planning, I guess. Prior planning prevents piss -poor performance, the 6Ps. There you go. Yep. You ask my children, they'll tell you what the 6Ps are. That's right. Murph, now, we'll finish up with this. I went and looked at what are some of the strangest laws in Alaska, and these are definitely Alaskan. It is illegal to whisper in someone's ear why they are moose hunting. Okay. It's legal to shoot bears. However, it is illegal to wake a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph. Why would you wake a sleeping bear? Isn't that the truth? Here's another thing, and I don't get it. It is considered an offense. It's illegal to feed alcoholic beverages to a moose. What? Why? Huh. Apparently, it's also illegal to sell stun guns to children. That one, I kind of get that makes sense. Well, if you're in Fairbanks, Alaska, if you love a vuvuzula, remember what they did during the World Cup. You know, you blow those things that make a lot of noise. Those annoying things? Yeah, it's illegal to blow a horn in a manner that disrupts the peace. Good. Yep. So, it's illegal to fatten up a sheep, cow, or pig within the city limits of Fairbanks. Are we talking about people or animals? Well, maybe it's meatball, and you'll have to listen to her. You'll have to listen to our warden of the throne. All right, it is also a crime to speak so loud that you offend a sensitive person enough to make him, her, or her leave if you're in Fairbanks. What? Okay, well, hey, be nice. That's just be nice. And you can only carry a concealed slingshot if you have received the appropriate license. The license. Do you have a license for that slingshot? All right. Oh, okay. I didn't know you had to have that. But Murph, this is the craziest one. This reminds me of an episode of you and JP on Narcos where you were accused of doing this, not a moose, but it is an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane. Well, you know, I gotta agree with that, but have you seen how big a moose is? How do you push it anywhere? Well, how do you get it into the damn airplane to begin with is what I wanna know. And who wants a moose, a pissed off moose, in their airplane? Uniquely Alaskan. So Mark Cameron, as we get into this, and again, we wanna thank our buddy, Patrick O 'Donnell, Cops and Writers. Go listen to his podcast. Hooked us up with him, but Mark Cameron is an interesting dude, moved from Weatherford, Texas to Alaska. And we're gonna talk about his book that was just released. It's an Arliss Kutter novel, Breakneck, by Mark Cameron. But the interesting thing too, Murph, was he wrote the last seven Tom Clancy novels. And this is a guy that used to be a marshal, which most of the reports were saw bad guy, put him in jail, you know? Not extensive reports in the marshal service. Saw a fugitive, arrested, same.
WTOP 24 Hour News
Fresh update on "building" discussed on WTOP 24 Hour News
"723 many employees went searching for greener pastures during the pandemic employers are now stepping up to try to keep them they called it the great resignation as the cost of living went up and stayed salaries flat many in the job market went elsewhere non -employers are hoping to hang on to employees and what's being called the big stay making retention a priority to keep people happy right where they are sure want more money but more and more employees are simply saying they want feedback and recognition for their hard work new research from gallop and work human finds a connection between recognition and workplace culture employees who strongly agree that recognition is important are half as likely to get burned out and seek elsewhere rolf fox wtop news taylor swift is in her nfl era taylor swift blew up social media and caused another fan frenzy for a second sunday this time at metlife stadium where she showed up with some celebrity friends to watch the kansas city chiefs take on the new york jets ladies and gentlemen the era's tour continues taylor swift is in the building and the league can thank swifties her rumored romance with tight end travis kelsey has caused nfl ratings and ticket sales to skyrocket according to stubhub this jets game was the second highest selling game of the season after its opener lower level resales we're going for as much as nine thousand dollars monica ricks cbs news sports at twenty five and fifty five powered by red river technology decisions aren't black and white think red we've got more nfl talk with dave preston that's right the commanders tie things up on the last
Latina to Latina
A highlight from How Rebecca Alvarez Story Built a Sexual Wellness Brand
"Ladies, gentlemen, welcome to the colorful world of Skittles. Skittles brings you a jolt of five fruity flavors in every bite, giving you the chance to taste the rainbow like never before. Break free from the ordinary day -to -day with the help of Skittles chewy candy. Skittles is a must in my candy jar, movie snack, even my secret to an afternoon pick -me -up. And I don't even care who knows it. Add a splash of joy to your day with Skittles. There's nothing better than fruity fun that tickles your taste buds. Taste the rainbow. I've been wanting to talk with Rebecca Albera's story for a while. She is an award -winning entrepreneur, sexologist, and intimate product developer. Three titles that do not often go together. But I'm glad we waited for this moment when, like many of my very favorite conversations, we find Rebecca and her company Bloomy, a wellness brand focused on clean, intimate care essentials, at an inflection point, asking the very familiar question, will what got us here get us to where we want to go next? Rebecca, finally, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad it worked. I'm so happy to have this conversation. Rebecca, among the things you say about intimacy is that so much of the root of intimacy is unlearning bad sex ed. What was the bad sex ed that you grew up with? My bad sex ed was actually no sex ed to start with. I definitely saw love, and my parents modeled that so well. But in terms of, like, in my community, in my school, did we have sex education? Not really, because it was abstinence -only education in high school. It's wild that someone goes from growing up in an environment that is abstinence -only to, I mean, by the time you are in college, you're very clear that you want to study sex and sexuality. I sit at the intersection of so many things, being Latina, a woman. I was a single mom at that time. I just felt like I could relate to so many people's intimacy journeys. And I wanted to create the spaces where we could talk about it. I didn't know exactly what it was going to look like. But yes, in college, I tell this story, you know, I was apprehensive about sexuality because my first year in college, I was actually assaulted. And I ended up transferring home. I ended up at Cal, a very liberal, very progressive school where I could take so many wonderful classes that were holistic, and I shared with people that it was very healing for me. I had great therapy. I had great all of that. But the education, it just transformed my life. When did it become clear to you that you are an entrepreneur? To be honest, I feel like I've always known this since I was little. I had that spirit of, oh, that should be a business. And why don't we have a solution? I would just see things differently than like the cousins I grew up with, I think. They would joke and say, why do you always have so many ideas? Why are you always so bossy? But it was just little. I was little and I was like taking initiative to create things. Talk me through the evolution of Blumey, because as I understand it, the original idea was a multi -brand marketplace. How did it morph from that concept to a place for education, advice on intimacy with a line of sexual wellness products? I had been in the industry for 10 years. I was working as a consultant for startups, helping them with their product development. And I was coaching both singles and couples, learning so much about intimacy challenges, intimacy goals, and really helping people in a lot of different ways, where at the end of so many of my sessions, my clients wanted solutions. They wanted the book, the product, the toy, the whatever it was. And so I would manually send this to them. I started creating a list, but it was a little bit like it was a lot of work on my end to always curate. And so what I did is I said, I'm just going to put these products that I recommend that are clean, because it's very important that these products be healthy, especially for these areas of the body, put them all on a page. And that was the beginning of Bloomie, where I had multiple brands. They were my favorite clean brands that I would recommend in the category. And then when I developed our first product with our team, it was called Bloomie Arousal Oil. We still sell it. It's a bestseller. That was just the beginning of a pivot for us. And that's why we fundraised and why we ended up really focusing on Bloomie's products, making solutions for products that I wish I had 10 years ago. The question I'm about to ask you seems particularly relevant given the timing of your and my conversation, but I want to take us back to April 2022. Your line is set to debut at Target and your funding falls short. How does that happen? Funding for women of color entrepreneurs is severely lower than what it should be. There is less than one percent of funding that is going to entrepreneurs of color and Latina founders. So I never use that as an excuse. But when I went out and I fundraised, I did everything by the book. I trained, I did accelerators, I did boot camps. I had a cis white male co -founder. I had everything you're supposed to, and I'm using quotes, to have. And we fell short. We wanted to raise two million. We raised one million. So what did I do? I ended up seeing that there is no standard for my industry. This is new. Intimacy companies were not being venture backed at that time. And I just realized I'm going to have to do things differently. So we crowd raised. We basically opened up part of our round to the community where they could invest one hundred or two hundred dollars minimum. We raised almost a million dollars that way, two different times. And then we also I took out personal loans. We had a few angels give us personal loans. I took out a line of credit. Like I did everything to make sure that we could have sufficient capital to meet the demands of going into retail. And even with that, I'll say when founders ask me, what does it take to go into retail? It's so big of a question. I want to sit down and go through things with people. But you have to estimate how much you're going to need to be on shelf, stay on shelf. That's even harder. Mark it and to not plan to be profitable right away.
WTOP 24 Hour News
Fresh update on "building" discussed on WTOP 24 Hour News
"Court gets back to work today after a summer recess it's 712 this is Greg O 'Connell with Nutanix many things in life are best when they're built to last the technology that's best when it's built to adapt a hybrid multi cloud environment should transform your operations by virtualizing application workloads across data centers public clouds and edge networks and enable you to run those workloads where and when you choose are you struggling with the constraints of IT that was or is built to last we'd like to invite you to learn more about how Nutanix is delivering the flexibility to run any application where and when you want Nutanix delivers the industry's leading hybrid multi cloud platform that enables applications to build IT infrastructure to adapt and because we know seeing is believing you you can take a no obligation test drive at Nutanix .com slash WTOP drive Again, that's a free test drive at Nutanix .com slash WTOP drive. It's fall in the DMV and you know what that means. It can be 80 degrees scorcher today and tomorrow we could wake up to snow flurries. So when it comes to heating and cooling your home, you need a sure thing. You need the pros at HVAC 911
The Crypto Conversation
A highlight from Versatus - The Most Versatile DevEx in Web3
"Hi everyone, Andy Pickering here, I'm your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Hey team, we have a new sponsor here at the Crypto Conversation, BitGet, one of the world's leading copy trading cryptocurrency exchanges, yes indeed. What happens if you've got the funds to invest but you don't have the time to keep track of the market? You still want to make smart money moves, what do you do? Well copy trading is a popular choice for beginner traders. You can shorten your learning curve by uncovering tips and strategies from more experienced traders. BitGet's copy trading platform has over 80 ,000 elite traders to choose from and 380 ,000 followers just like yourself who are already using the BitGet copy trading platform as a potential passive income stream. All it takes is one click, you can subscribe to an elite profitable strategist, set your limits, automate your orders and monitor their trades. I've got some links in the show notes below, one link will take you through to the BitGet sign up page, give you a VIP discount. So learn all about it for yourself, thanks to BitGet. And now it is on with the show. My guest today is Andrew Smith, Andrew is the founder of Versatus Labs, building out the most versatile DevEx in Web3. Welcome to the show Andrew. Thanks for having me Andy. It is a pleasure, let's do what we do at the beginning of the show Andrew, it would be great if you could please introduce yourself. I'd love to hear a little bit about your, I guess, personal and professional backstory, what you've been doing that has led you to founding Versatus Labs. Yeah, absolutely. So I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, which is where I now reside again. I did do a stint in Denver, Colorado and an extended stint in Los Angeles. So I was gone from my hometown for about 12 years. I programming started at the age of 14, a technology teacher and seventh grade enemy, the classic, the C programming language book and said, learn this, I think it's going to be important. And so I did, never really did much as a kid other than like, you build like space invader clones and C and a couple of other things. Picked up Python and C++ a little bit later in life, during high school and, you know, was very, very interested in the cross -section of like machine learning and AI and economics. Economics is really sort of my first love, even though I'm a programmer, I kind of always wanted to be an economist, but just found that there's not really a lot of money in it unless you work for a political campaign. So it wasn't going to do that. And programming and machine learning in particular was something that I thought I could apply my love and knowledge of economics to. So it was building machine learning algorithms very, very early on before you add any of the sort of open source tools that you have today that makes it easy. And was sending my resume and GitHub around to a bunch of different hedge funds. Yes, this was going back about 10, 11 years now. And finally found one that was willing to give me a little bit of money to play around with. It's a group called Trident Asset Management. They're based part -time out of Connecticut and part -time out of Colorado, wasn't going to move to Connecticut. So that's what took me to Denver, then did the same thing for a fixed income shop based out of Newport Beach. That's how I ended up in Los Angeles. Started my first startup there, it's called Owl ESG, it's a environmental, social and governance data company built out, you know, some machine learning models and, you know, from PDFs, sort of scraping about 30 ,000 documents a day and extracting the data and building out a ESG data set. Grew that company and then in 2020 decided to start Versatus. So started this sort of hobby project, was doing a solo build on it, spent about 18 months solo building and was talking to a few friends in the space and they thought I was really onto something. So made some introductions, next thing you knew we were raising our first round from jumping big brain, hiring out an engineering team and now 14 months later, here we are. Very nice, very nice. Thank you, Andrew. Give us an idea then of, I guess, your vision for Versatus. What are you guys building? What's the vision? Yeah, so the vision is like the best way to put it, even though this is an imperfect if analogy is you think of like the cloud compute providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, et cetera, you know, they own these huge data centers and these data centers are effectively a commodity business. You know, they build out a warehouse and put a bunch of servers in it, connect those servers to the Internet, occasionally maintain them and update them in and of themselves. They're not really that valuable. What makes them really valuable is that they provide all these tools that make it easy and efficient for developers to interact with those data centers and build applications on top of them to store data inside of them, et cetera. We believe that blockchain is analogous to that. It's not, again, it's an imperfect analogy. But if you kind of view the blockchains that exist in the world today and the ones that will come in the future as those data centers, next generation data centers where we provide value is we provide that program ability layer and compute layer that makes it easy and efficient for developers to build on top of blockchains. So we what we're building is a decentralized compute stack that enables developers to build in any language on any chain. And I think this is really powerful for a number of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll get to. But one of the major barriers to entry for developers is the language barrier. There's also a pretty big tooling barrier as well, which we saw that the language barrier, you know, if you're you want to build in Web3, the first thing you need to do is either go learn Solidity or Rust or one of the other languages. And Rust is a general purpose language. There are some people that already know it, but anybody that's entering into Web3 at the very beginning and they've got to go learn Solidity. Right. So a lot of them just don't view it as worthwhile to go learn Solidity. It's a domain specific language. The only thing you'll ever be able to do with that is build EVM compatible smart contracts. So until and unless there's a robust enough financial incentive for them to actually go and learn Solidity, they're probably not going to. But what we found from doing some pretty significant market research is if they could just use their existing languages and existing tools, they'd be happy to hobby hack and maybe even look for a job or start their own project and build on top of blockchains. So we want to make that process easier. We want to reduce the barrier to entry for developers. We believe that developers precede users, that you need developers to build applications that users actually want to use if we're ever going to see mass adoption for Web3. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, Andrew. And I've seen you guys talk about this and some of your comms, I guess, because that's kind of it is flipping the script, right? Because everyone thinks, yeah, OK, it's the transition to Web3, easy as just got to build some user user friendly apps and and and if you build it, they will come. But of course, real life has has not been that simple. So so your philosophy is essentially the reverse of that. So you want to attract as many developers as possible. So just talk us through that again. I mean, you have a little bit, but just explain why you think that is really the key to the paradigm shift for Web2 to Web3. Yeah, absolutely. I think like just kind of telling the story of some case studies probably helps here, right? So you never know where a killer app is going to come from. I mean, Facebook started as a dating app for Ivy Leaguers, right? And it's Harvard and Yale dating app. You know, Slack started as a video game studio and Slack was their internal messaging network. So and now that is the product. Killer applications oftentimes come from experimentation. And the more experiments you have going on, the higher the probability that you're going to find stuff that people actually want to interact with and use. There are some precursors to what makes a killer app, things that make people's lives more convenient. That's just undeniably is going to make their life better, makes their work more productive. These are usually more business applications, makes the world more connected. These are social media type of applications or makes their life more affordable. So things that create efficiencies that reduce the cost of things that they were already doing. So, look, if I knew what that killer app was going to be, I'd probably go build that. It probably would be easier. But what I what I think where I think killer apps come from is lots of developers trying lots of things and competing for the limited funding and resources out there. And then you have unfortunately you do have gatekeepers in the world that you have VCs and you have investors and angel investors. So typically, yeah, there's going to be some stuff that's lost in the process of gathering funding and everything else that might have been really cool. But really, like if you have lots of things competing, probably the cream rises to the top and you're going to get well -funded, really interesting application ideas that can then promote themselves and attract users. The users are going to come for the applications right now. We have sort of the most users will ever have. If this is all we ever have to offer, which is effectively gambling and speculation, I think we've captured the gambling market pretty, pretty, pretty well. The speculator market we captured pretty well. They're here to make money off of token price fluctuations. If we want people that are here for the long term to use applications, well, we need to offer the applications that they want to use. And I think where that comes from, it's largely a numbers game. It's Pareto principle, you know, 10 percent, 20 percent of the developers are going to create the applications that get 80 percent, 90 percent of the users. So if we want to have a bigger 20 percent of applications that get lots of users, we need a bigger 100 percent. We need a bigger pie in general. And the only way to get a bigger pie is to reduce the cost, both time and money cost of building in Web3. And that's what we're attempting to do, particularly on the on the time cost of things, reduce the opportunity cost of learning how to build in Web3 by making it easier for them to build in Web3. So that's really sort of how we think about this. We think that developers necessarily are a precursor to users. If you look at like some of the market research we've done, it's kind of an either or like if there were more users, developers would take the time to learn this stuff. But the problem is, is that there's not going to be more users until developers learn how to build this stuff. So that's kind of where we see ourselves. We we believe we can be the catalyst for a Cambrian explosion of Web3 developers coming from all different walks of life, bring in product managers that they can understand how to manage a project that's being built in Python or Go or C++, but may not understand how to manage a project that's being built in Solidity, bring in on, you know, entrepreneurs that they come into this space and they look at, OK, well, how do I build a team out to build this? And what they see is extremely high cost of talent acquisition because there just isn't that big of a pool of Solidity developers. So make the talent pools that they can hire from significantly bigger, reduce that cost. Now you get some of those non -technical entrepreneurs looking at Web3 as a way to build their application. That's kind of the way we look at it. Just make the process easier, reduce those barriers. You'll get that first wave who's like jumping at the bit to come into Web3 and then they'll build some apps. You'll get more users. You'll then get the next wave of developers who see that there's financial incentives to doing so. It's going to be a process. It's going to take time. But we believe within the next seven to 10 years, if you offer up the correct tools and stacks, that about a third of all applications will be built on decentralized stacks for a number of different reasons, which we could talk to if you'd like. But that's where we see our value proposition is we make it easier for them. They come in, they build, then you get the users, then more come in and build, and so forth and so forth. You create a flywheel effect. OK, well, thank you, Andrew. And look, we don't need to get too deep into the weeds, but just talking about that decentralized stack, I suppose that you guys are building at Versatus. You have your own layer one blockchain, right? And there's the consensus mechanism, I believe, is proof of claim. So maybe just give us the kind of the two minute overview of your stack, I suppose. Yeah, so our L1 is primarily used for content addressing programs that are deployed to our network. So this is a way that our compute nodes can verify that they're executing the correct programs and such that watcher nodes and validators can also ensure that those compute nodes are not acting maliciously, that they're executing the correct programs. Our consensus mechanism, so proof of claim is actually our election mechanism. So this is how we elect nodes to quorums. Our consensus mechanism, we call it farmer harvester. Basically, it's a modification of what many distributed systems engineers would know as the worker collector model, but to fit a Byzantine fault tolerant model. So in your worker collector model, you basically have worker nodes that are individual nodes that they're allocated compute tasks. They execute those compute tasks and return the results to a collector node, which collects them and does batch updates into a database or to wherever they're storing state in our model. You don't want to have single nodes doing this work because then if a single node is malicious, they can actually create have state altering transactions that are incorrect. So we do have we form quorums as opposed to having single nodes. And then 60 percent of that quorum needs to what we call redundant, redundantly execute the program. So redundantly execute the program, return results, agree on results and then send votes to the what we call the harvester quorum. So, again, instead of having a single collector, we have a quorum of collectors that they then need to agree on the threshold of votes being reached before they would commit that to a block. So that's sort of very high level overview of how our architecture works. Now, again, like our goal is to enable language agnosticism on top of every chain. So not just for our L1, but on top of Ethereum, on top of other chains as well. And the primary reason for having our own L1 is it's a place where we can efficiently prove that compute nodes in our network are using the correct program, they're executing the correct program. And it's also a place where we can accrue value to those compute nodes. So whether they're being paid by another network's native token or they're being paid for executing compute on our network, we can emit our native tokens to them as an L1. So they're bootstrapped. And that way they're earning some money off of it. And then also it's a place where we can accrue fees back to our own L1 so that those compute nodes have a place where they're getting paid. Got it. Thank you, Andrew. If we kind of zoom out then to some more kind of, I guess, just a general state of where we are and the slow transition from Web 2 to Web 3. You saw a lot of the big brands, big financial institutions start to experiment with blockchain, but they were kind of like, they weren't really interested in building on Bitcoin or Ethereum. They went down the route of building their own private blockchains, which was a little bit pointless perhaps in hindsight. And now we're seeing with so many different chains around now and much more interoperability, brands and institutions are recognizing that it's to their benefit and everyone to build on the decentralized stacks that you're talking about. So maybe just you look at, I'd love you to paint a picture of, I suppose, your ideas of where we are now and your vision for what the next steps are just over, I guess, the next wave of adoption, maybe what's going to ignite the next hype cycle. How do you think about this? Yeah, so it's an interesting question. I try to steer away from predictions as much as possible. If I were a better investor, I probably would just be investing and making money that way. I do think the key, going back to hate to just sort of beat a dead horse, but the key is going to be getting more developers and whether those are enterprise developers, which I think what we're building provides a lot of value to enterprises. Again, they don't need to go out and hire a bunch of solidity developers that have four or five, six years experience. They can hire much more experienced developers or use the existing developers they have on staff. That to me is the key. I think we need more people trying things, pushing the limits of what's possible on top of this technology in order for us to find the use cases that are going to lead to mass adoption. I also think that enterprises, there are potentially some use cases for enterprise blockchains, but for the most part, I think one of the things that steered enterprises away from using public blockchains were privacy concerns. Right now, if you were to have a corporate wallet on top of Ethereum, everybody knows how much money you have in that. I think that level of transparency is something that scares a lot of enterprises and the closer we move towards being able to have on -chain privacy, so provability, but without revealing the underlying values, the more you'll see enterprises adopt public blockchains as a place, as a development environment, as a place to build and deploy applications to both internal applications as well as consumer facing or other business facing applications. But I think you've got to solve that privacy issue. Transparency is good when needed. It's also something that can be a deterrent to particularly large publicly traded companies who have to report to the SEC, who get audited, all these other things. They don't want all of this information, their financial information public. So finding ways to create some privacy around that I think will probably help with enterprise adoption. Yeah, yeah. Makes perfect sense, Andrew. What about, how does AI fit into this? I know it's a little bit of a tangent, but I've seen you guys talk a little bit about AI. I think you've probably got some opinions. So yeah, I mean, anything you want to kind of speculate on in terms of the, I guess the intersection of AI and web3 in the future? So in one word, trust, I think that's the key is that we're able to offer trust is very, very expensive. And I'm not talking about just necessarily blockchain trust, but trust in general. It's very expensive and it's at the core of how and why society works. If you don't have trust, society breaks down. So we have to trust each other, that we have our individual best interests in mind. And as a result of us trusting that we each want to do what's best for ourselves, we know that we're not going to put ourselves in a situation to damage each other because that might hurt ourselves. So having trust in AI models is going to be really, really important. And right now that mechanism works because OpenAI runs it and OpenAI is a big company, they have profit motives, but it's all centralized. As we move to a world where there's decentralized AI models, there needs to be some way to trust that that AI model is not malicious. And I think blockchain can be a huge component of that and tokenization, staking, and being able to lend trust to compute models is a really important component of it. I think it's an area where we fit in really, really well in particular. So that to me is the most obvious intersection of AI and blockchain. Particularly when it comes to things like deep fakes, I think you want to be able to have some verifiability behind images. You want to have some verifiability behind videos. You can just imagine a scenario where somebody creates a deep fake there's and no way to prove that this came from an AI model, and all of a sudden chaos ensues in a city or in a region or in a country because of some deep fake that people think is real. So there are a lot of concerns around fake news use cases for AI, and how do we solve for that problem? How do we put a marker on that image or on that video that proves that this came from a model and having some sort of watermark of trust? I think that crypto can provide that in some ways. So that's one area. I also think there's a lot of concern about existential threats related to AI and decentralizing AI models and getting them out of the hands of individuals and into the hands of communities, open sourcing them, and then providing incentives around building these models in a way to where they won't create existential threats. I don't think we're quite there yet. I'm less of an AI doomer than a lot of people. But to the AI doomers, I would say use crypto as a way to provide some of these guarantees that your model is not going to go off the rails.
Bloomberg Daybreak
Fresh update on "building" discussed on Bloomberg Daybreak
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Elevation with Steven Furtick
A highlight from Navigating Not Enough
"Hey, this is Steven Furtick. I'm the pastor of Elevation Church, and this is our podcast. I wanted to thank you for joining us today. Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith. Hope it gives you perspective to see God is moving in your life. Enjoy the message. Remain standing remain standing. Once you've hugged enough put those hands together and welcome our eFam all over the world. Hey everybody. We're about to be we're about to be out on the road this week Elevation Nights, Miami, Florida, Tampa, Florida. Knoxville, Tennessee, Atlanta area, Birmingham, then we're going to Texas. I'm gonna get Tim Riggins and then we're going over to Lubbock and Dallas and Houston. ElevationNights .com. There are still some tickets in some locations. Don't buy it from a scalper. Don't support that nonsense, but we really want to see you there. We're expecting God to do great amazing things. Clap your hands if you're expecting it right now. God is good. God is good. God is so good so faithful. Well today this message that I have to share with you is one that everybody in the room needs. So sometimes I'll say this message is for somebody. I don't know who this is for. But today I know it's for all y 'all. So look at somebody and say you too, not the band. It's going to be good. I'm going to read from Matthew chapter 15 verse 29 through 38 a familiar story with a twist and not for the sake of being clever, but for the sake of something that I believe God wants to speak to you today in a fresh way. Matthew chapter 15 verse 29 And while you're turning there in your Bible, let us know online where you're joining us from. We'd love to know your name and where you're joining us from as well right there in the comments. Matthew chapter 15 verse 29. Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down great crowds came to him bringing the lame the blind the crippled the mute many others and laid them at his feet and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking the crippled made well the lame walking and the blind seeing and they praised the God of Israel. Jesus called his disciples to him and said I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry or they may collapse on the way his disciples answered. Where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd? How many loaves do you have Jesus asked seven they replied and a few small fish. He told the crowd to sit down on the ground then he took the seven loaves and fish and when he had given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples and they in turn to the people they all ate and were satisfied afterward the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. Okay verse 38. Let's read this one to the number of those who ate was besides 4000 men women and children and I'm calling this message today navigating not enough. We've all been there. We will all be there at some point so I can't think of a more important class to teach today than navigating not enough and let's just pray one more time for the Holy Spirit to guide us into truth Lord. You said that you would do that that you would lead us and guide us and remind us of the things that matter and teach us the things that we need to know do that just now for these people for everybody who will hear this message is navigating something that is not enough, but you are more than enough. Yes, so bring us to that place in space and presence of mind to see you as you are. We give you praise in Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated. I made a list in my phone. I read it to you. Time, money, sleep, energy, friends, confidence, opportunity, authority, freedom, flexibility, discipline, experience, joy, peace, wisdom, and I stopped there with 15 because Matthew 15. I thought be cool do 15 15 things that I just said that someone in this room feels like they don't have enough of right now time money sleep energy friends confidence opportunity authority freedom flexibility discipline experience joy peace wisdom everyone will have to navigate an area of not enough in your life in a way that comforts me to know that for all the things that I don't feel like I have enough of there's some things you don't have enough of with your needy self either kind of evens the playing field. So don't be intimidated. Don't be intimidated not in here. Anyway, the ground is level at the foot of the cross. We're all here because we need Jesus and Jesus is complete. Jesus Christ is complete fully God fully man at the sound of that truth echoes back another truth that in him. I am complete. He is enough. I am enough and yet there's no shortage of needs in this room and everyone will have to pass through in different moments of your life different facets of this same neighborhood called not enough and we have to talk about how to navigate that because I have found that not only is the the not enough thing a battle that never goes away, but it is a battle that never fully gets in balance and what I mean by that is when I read that list of things there have been seasons in my life where I worked my way into enough of one of them. Only to find another one screaming. Hey now that you got enough money, you don't have any time. Yeah, I thought about this in the area of discipline. I try to be disciplined person in my life. I need that to stay on track and yet I noticed the times in my life where my discipline is really keyed in sometimes I get so rigid that I lose my empathy. And I'm doing really good with my disciplines, but I'm mad at everybody else that they aren't as disciplined as me. Now I'm judgy. So it's good, you know, I've got my macros and my workouts and my Bible time but creates a whole other not enough over on this side and I don't really want to stay in this too long just wanted to set up the idea of not enough and I realized when I made the title navigating not enough and God kind of led me to call this message that that in that title navigating not enough. I am the best one to teach this class because the two biggest fears in my life are both in that title. Not enough and navigating. I told you two weeks ago that I have no sense of direction and I still don't there's been no supernatural miracle since then and the idea of this passage here I looked at one verse and I want to show it to you again that the disciples said again a pretty familiar scripture that I'm sharing with you today. But what they said to Jesus when he said I want to feed all these people I can get with because in verse 33 they answered where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd and we're going to stay with that question for a moment because it's very important. Where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd and here are my two primary fears in life all in one Bible verse and the first one is the fear of running out which runs deep for me. I don't know if there's any scarcity mentality in your life or some kind of like deficit oriented way of thinking where you wake up each day at zero. I don't know if you ever do a little fire drills to try to figure out how you could sell everything and live in a living underground live in a tent somewhere if it came to that but the fear of running out I can't tell you how I can't explain I cannot explain to you how important it is that my phone is completely charged 93 % is not a hundred percent. I cannot run out of battery. What would I do if the phone died? I would die. It's a fear that runs from everything from iPhones to sermon material a lot of times when I preach too long is because I was scared I'd get up here and have nothing to say. So then I went and messed around study too long and kept you three hours, but my heart's in the right place. I don't want you to show up hungry and collapse when you leave because I was watching the game instead. So I really really really relate to this thing of where could we get enough the fear of running out and then what makes it even worse put the scripture back up. Where could we get enough bread in this remote place? Did you notice that so now not only do I not have enough that's my first fear in life, but I don't know where I am. And I need to know where I am and if I don't know where I am I need to be with somebody who knows where they are and that's where you're like, but the disciples had Jesus. So it really didn't matter because if you've got Jesus you've always got enough and isn't it interesting how confidently you say that about them back then.
Tech Path Crypto
A highlight from 1273. Ethereum Built on Bitcoin | Spiderchain Layer-2 INTERVIEW w/Botanix Labs
"All right, so today we're going to dive into Bitcoin, but not in the normal and usual way. Actually, we're going to break into possibly an alternative for Bitcoin through an Ethereum EVM. We'll talk all about that today. You guys are going to love it. My name is Paul Veron. Welcome back into Tech Path. Joining me today is Willem Schrow, who's coming over from Botanics Labs. So, great to have you. Great to meet you all. Great to meet you, Paul. Hey, Willem. All right. So first, let's get into just in general what you guys are trying to do with Botanics. Give me kind of a breakdown. Yeah. So Botanics is actually a layer two on Bitcoin, but it is fully EVM equivalent. What that means is any of the applications that you see on Ethereum today are now possible on Botanics and are possible on Bitcoin. So with any of the applications, suddenly you will see Bitcoin instead of Ethereum. And so we bring the whole world of the EVM to Bitcoin and we bring the whole world and the capital of Bitcoin to the EVM. So why bring EVM to Bitcoin? What's the core behind it? What are you guys trying to solve in terms of just the overall technical aspect? Yeah, very good question. Well, it went back like a year where we tried to figure out where is this whole crypto infrastructure going to go to 10 years from now. And very interesting, we saw like a paradox play out. On the one hand, you have Bitcoin, which is the biggest market cap and still considered by many the one and real decentralized reserve currency. And on the other hand, you have Ethereum and the EVM with so many applications built on top of it. And how do you fit these two together? And basically what we saw play out is, OK, Bitcoin, almost no applications on top of it. And the EVM, which is what powers Ethereum, is actually where all the applications are built upon. And you can actually take the EVM part and put that on top of Bitcoin. And suddenly you can use all the Bitcoin that you have and you can use it in the applications that you find on Ethereum. OK, all right. Is it a scenario where Bitcoin benefits more or does Ethereum benefit more in this particular scenario? In this scenario, because we are fully on Bitcoin, so the whole protocol will run on Bitcoin, you will use Bitcoin to buy NFTs, you will use Bitcoin to be in DeFi indexes. Bitcoin is here, the big winner, and our applications that we want to bring are really to the Bitcoiners. All right. So I was looking at your website and on the how does Botanics work, and it gets into the spider chain. You know, I'm kind of highlighting that on screen right now. But the question I have for you is the difference between the spider chain and what Layer 2 Labs is doing with their BIP sidechain, because we've had Paul on before talking about, you know, what Layer 2 Labs does and what sidechains do and how they would kind of change the dynamic. What is the difference between what you guys are doing and them? Yeah, so the end goal is actually very similar to bring the EVM or other sidechains to Bitcoin. However, the approach and the technology is very different. Drive chains need a Bitcoin soft fork, so they need an upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol while we do not require any soft fork. So the spider chain is actually possible on Bitcoin today, which is a big difference. So in reality, this is actually a proof of stake. And so the random subset of participants are all stakers. So anyone in the world will be able to run the full protocol. Anyone will be able to stake and then the decentralized multistake will basically choose random participants out of that staker set. And so right now we are fully building it. I actually saw the testnet run this week. We will go public with that very soon and then we will start building towards the main net. Now, one of the things that happens when you run proof of stake on top of Bitcoin, it also means that in the very initial phases, when you have very little Bitcoin staked, you are very vulnerable to an attack, basically someone coming in with 5000 Bitcoin, taking over majority control of the stake and attacking the platform. And that's why we will start off federated in a more centralized way. We will be like liquid basically on Bitcoin, have some federated partners that we work together with until there's sufficient activity in win and we can make the full protocol permissions. All right. I think that's a good step, you know, because you're right with these kinds of things and this kind of scenario that would make it a little bit of a thing at risk. All right. So when you look at both Bitcoin, what we've seen in terms of the core, the core devs on Bitcoin, very reluctant to change over the years. And then you look at the evolution of what's happened within the Ethereum ecosystem and it's the exact opposite. They're just a constant, you know, throw of new devs. There's a constant new innovation happening, a test of all sorts. I mean, when you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, is Bitcoin ever going to catch up in terms of dev activity and real movement to become something of a true currency or at least the use case of currency? Because I think that's obviously for Ethereum what ETH seems to be trying to achieve. Bitcoin ever going to catch up here? What do you thought? Yeah, I think Bitcoin itself as the Bitcoin protocol, I don't think so. It's most important for Bitcoin that it's decentralized and secure. And so that also means not a lot of upgrades. I think for all the layer twos and a lot of applications that are built on top of Bitcoin, absolutely. I think we are going to see a very big explosion of applications and layer twos in the coming years. And maybe to go further on to that point, I actually believe a big portion of the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum is because of their foundational beliefs, which leads to a culture difference. Like the Bitcoiners, they align more with decentralization is the first principle that matters the most. The Ethereum proponents align more as a first principle. It needs to be composable. It needs to be a virtual machine. And then you have, for example, people who like Solana more, they say speed is the other most important. Same for Monero and privacy. Now, out of all of these properties, I would say Bitcoin as being the layer one for reserve currency is the most important. But all the other properties who are also very valid and have reached product market fit, you can bring them on top of Bitcoin as a layer two. And that's what I think will happen. Yeah. So in terms of the user experience on on spider chains like this, is this going to be different from other layer twos that would play into this? Yeah. So in terms of user experience, we have optimized for that and we think it's going to be extremely easy to go on to Botanics. For people who have used Arbitrum, Botanics is going to feel like you're bridging from Ethereum to Arbitrum, exactly the same. We will provide you with a certain Bitcoin address you send from any wallet, any exchange, any cold wallet, Bitcoin to that address. And boom, you have Bitcoin in your metamask. I like it. Which is that is so bizarre to see how this is going. As far as timeline, when you look at the current progress you guys have made so far, what the roadmap looks like. I'll get to the roadmap in a second. I'm just kind of curious, just from a framework of timing here, you've got a halving coming up. There's going to be a lot of acceleration around Bitcoin and its use, along with a lot of people getting into it, just recognizing Bitcoin for the first time. How long before this could potentially be a real solution? Yeah, it's very interesting. Development, as long as you're not online and the blockchain is not fully running, can go really fast. So our iteration steps, our testing process are going very fast to the moment we will go out with a testnet this month in October. And then after that, we actually are very happy with the timing that the Bitcoin halving is coming very soon because we actually aim for the mainnet by the Bitcoin halving. So mainnet basically means you will be able to use it. You will start having all your favorite EVM applications, but using Bitcoin with it. So explain to me, Willem, how Spiderchain would be different than, say, something like Stacks, you know, building obviously with ordinals playing into this. How is it and what are the core attributes that would make it different? Yeah, two big differences there. So Stacks runs on the Stacks token, Botanics runs on Bitcoin. And a second big difference is we are fully EVM equivalent. What means that any application that is built on Ethereum is able to be deployed, plug and play, copy paste on top of Botanics. OK, so we have a lot of Bitcoiners on our show, people who just think it's kind of the only way. And then we have a lot of people where I would say we're a neutral network. You know, we look at people that are really into Web3 and the development of what's going on with Bitcoin, along with other projects that are in the layer one camps, especially if you think about even Cardano and Avalanche. But you look at Bitcoiners and they're very, very centralized into the, I should say, the culture, not decentralized, obviously, as a platform, but the culture itself kind of has one vision. Have you had a lot of pushback from Bitcoiners in general? Yeah, more than I expected, actually, and the biggest pushback is actually on the EVM part, even though our whole protocols run on runs on Bitcoin. So I expect that a lot of Bitcoiners to actually fully love this. A lot of the pushback has been on the EVM, which is the Ethereum virtual machine. And it is actually because of the connotation and the bias that they have with Ethereum. But you actually argue that the EVM is a hugely powerful virtual machine and actually think the EVM has won out what we call the virtual machine battle. We think a lot of the applications that we're seeing have been built on virtual machines and the EVM is the biggest virtual machine out there. Yeah. Is there, in terms of support, where is that coming from for this project? Yeah, very interesting. It's everyone who aligns with our vision that says, like, OK, we see Bitcoin is the currency, but it's very good at being digital gold and being very decentralized and secure. But then on the other hand, they also love the EVM. They also love playing around in DeFi, on DEXs, by NFTs. And so it's basically someone who is active in the application ecosystem, but still holds Bitcoin in there called Wal -Mart. And so these two visions, they're not mutually exclusive. You can build the EVM on top of Bitcoin. And those are the people who we've seen the most support from.
The Breakdown
A highlight from Where Crypto Has Product-Market Fit (And Where It Doesn't)
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, October 1st, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, welcome to one of the best months of the year, October. You love to see it. Around here in these crypto parts, we call this October, and I don't know if the price is going to follow that, but I certainly know that the vibes will. Now, it is Long Read Sunday, and this show represents for me not only a chance to bring in the opinions of other people, but also a chance to think a little bit more broadly, a little bit less focused on the news of the day or the week. And so with that in mind, we turn to a piece from Li Jin, one of the co -founders of Variant, that makes an argument about one of the big challenges that faces the industry as it attempts to go more mainstream. I think it's an interesting argument, and so I'm going to read the piece and then we'll talk about it a little bit further. The essay is called, The Barrier to Mainstream Crypto Adoption Isn't UX, It's Product -Market Fit. Li writes, Discussions about accelerating adoption of crypto often focus on improving user experience. The popular thinking goes, Web3 products lag behind from a user experience perspective, onboarding poses multiple points of friction, and technological concepts come with learning curves. Web3 is missing a seamless experience for apps that will unlock greater adoption. While improving crypto UX is certainly important, I believe that the more significant and urgent barrier to adoption is building things that people want. Web3 has a product market fit problem, not a UX problem. Product market fit is when a product satisfies a strong market need. For consumer builders, the elegance and challenge in building for consumers is that humans have remarkably consistent needs across time. That's why Maslow's hierarchy of needs continues to resonate nearly a century after its introduction, with universal needs ranging from the physiological food, shelter, and clothing, to the psychological — belonging, love, entertainment, and esteem. The history of consumer startups is one of continual innovation in solving for human needs in novel ways. Though people often dismiss new consumer apps as incremental innovations in flipping categories — i .e. teens making dance videos — the truth is that successful startups offer a step -function improvement in enabling people to achieve a core need. Amazon sold us books and everything else in just a few clicks, dramatically easing the process for procuring goods. Facebook enabled us to connect with those we care about instantly. Tinder exposed us to an order of magnitude more potential romantic partners than anyone could stumble on in real life. There is a lot of evidence that when the user benefit is great enough, users are willing to jump through UX hurdles and learn new behaviors, in crypto and beyond. Examples include the first iPhone, which lacked a touch keyboard, the internet itself, and all crypto assets and applications that have had significant adoption to date — NFTs during the last bull market being a primary example. For products that solve a core need, unfamiliar and complicated UX hasn't been a blocker. Despite the long list of multifaceted user needs, so far, explorations of the opportunities that crypto can uniquely address have been largely limited to the financial realm. While income is a widespread need, products where income derives from speculation work when the market goes up but lose their appeal as prices fall. It's a tough sell, especially when there are alternatives for users to attain income with less risk and uncertainty. There is an opportunity for crypto builders to build products that better address other human needs, such as belonging, community, and entertainment. What could that look like? On a small scale, NFT communities and decentralized autonomous organizations have satisfied some people's need for belonging, forging novel social graphs on the basis of asset ownership. To those who say that shared financial interests can't be the basis for real relationships, consider that many of our real -world connections are predicated on ownership, whether that's There's an opportunity to leverage on -chain assets as the basis for new communities that solve for belonging, esteem, and connection. In August 2023 alone, 94 .5 million NFTs were minted across Ethereum and its Layer 2 scalability protocols. As the volume of user activity grows, imagine inferring users' interests based on on -chain actions and exposing connections based on a rich activity history. On -chain media expands our entertainment options, giving us skin in the game for what we consume and create online. On platforms like sound .xyz, friend .tech, and Zora, users can bet on media and creators they believe in, enhancing their experience of the content and turning these networks into financialized games. In a world where all media is incepted as NFTs, there will be a new economic dimension that can enrich our experience of the internet. These are just starting points for what it could look like for crypto to find product -market fit and address needs beyond just income. There's room for much more experimentation from here. To achieve widespread adoption and evolve beyond their current niche, crypto products need to enhance the human experience through solutions that wouldn't be possible without crypto.
Evangelism on SermonAudio
A highlight from Reaching Out / Great Ideas for Evangelism
"We talked about survival last night. You know there's a saying I've always thought, don't wait until you're thirsty to dig a well. A lot of times we wait until the 15th round before we've been knocked down, before we go for help. Isn't that true? Sometimes we have to hit that bottom bottom, I guess. Just don't take things for granted. Good lives, lives that are together are not my accident. They're my right choices. The world just says you're lucky, but we know it's not luck. We know it's not luck. You don't order godly kids in the catalog. I'm a godly kid, respectful. You don't order me, you have to build lives. And I tell you what, we live in a day that, I tell you what, it's kind of sad. God doesn't give you wisdom. To see things how he sees them, and actually to see through things. To see through the deception of Satan. Look, two things I begged for in my life. I begged to be a solider, and I begged to raise my kids. He used to beg God for wisdom, because I knew his past was going to be greater than me. He used to say, if you want to mess up your life, that's your choice, but you're not messing your kids' lives up. And I don't know, I guess God, I just begged God for wisdom, and then James, he says he'll give it to you liberally if you ask. And I do believe he has. I got a lady in my church, my secretary, I'm going to be the secretary. She said, I think there is certainly something about raising kids. And if I really even know what I said, I just need to ask her. I think she wrote down everything I've ever said. And it's nice to have people listen. You know, it's ironic, people in my church now are more like me than my own kids. That's just the way it is. They're more like their pastor. They've been influenced by their pastor. My people have been influenced by me. They've been sitting under my preaching group, some of them, for 29 years. So, you know, they actually thank and remind me of how my kids would be. I see my kids, and they've kind of sometimes drifted away from different ways. And it kind of hurts me, but they become like their pastor. And, you know, so we just need to try to encourage each other, you know, hold together. You know, we're one body of many members. Amen. I think I heard one time that a car has about 30 ,000 parts. You know, it takes all of them to put together. It only takes one of them to miss malfunctions before you're in trouble. Isn't that the truth? You know, when one malfunction, you know, you have maybe eight cylinders on your car. You know, when one of them malfunctions, you lose a lot more than one -eighth of your power. Anyone in those cars knows if one plug or one wire is misfiring, it's like you lose 70 % of your power. And, you know, we got to make sure we don't malfunction on starry again. Mm -hmm. Joe, Steve will bring her own water tonight, because I'm not falling for that one yet. You know, we just need to work together as a body. You know, hey, I always tell my people, the devil only needs one heart to work out of. Don't let your heart be that one he works out of. It's a dangerous place to be, too. And, well, I think we have enough work out here. We have enough people that I think God's work, besides having Christians, amen, but Ezekiel, if you're Ezekiel 33 now, verse, I just thought we'd start at verse 31. It says, and they came unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear my words, but they will not do them. For with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth after covetousness, passions, desires, things like that. And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument, for they hear thy words, but they do them not. They were too powerful at first, aren't they? Man, I just read that. They point that verse, so many people are, they sit in church, and, you know, they may say, oh, it's a good message, whatever, but they just don't do them. God says, happier little do these things, amen, you know? And just knowing them and not doing them actually just makes you miserable, probably, right? Some people just have enough religion to bug them instead of bless them. Isn't that the truth? Yeah, just enough to just make them miserable without making them joyful. One guy I've told, and I've heard this all the time, but he's going to tell me in church, he says, the pastor's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, you know? So I'm here to try to disturb you where you're comfortable and comfort you where you're hurting. Amen? And so we come here tonight and turn with me now to Mark, Matthew, Mark, I think, with the gospel, where Christ is portrayed as his servant. You know, the four gospels in Matthew, God is portrayed as a king, as a king, and Mark as a servant, and Mark and Luke as a son of man, and John, the son of God. And we find here one of my passages I love, and I don't know, anyone have favorite, I love, I have so many favorite passages, I guess, but I like this one because it's about four men, I guess, a four, but I guess I can't even say for sure, I'm sure there were probably men that took a man of palsy that was paralyzed through the Peter's house roof to get him to Jesus to be healed. It says there in chapter two, no, actually this just follows where I talked about it the other day about the leper that was healed, and Jesus said in verse 44, right before that in chapter one, see thou say nothing to any man that would go thy way and show thyself to the priests and offer for like cleanliness these things which Moses commanded for a testimony to them. But he went out and began to publicize it much, to blaze abroad the matter, and so much that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city. I mean, God, Jesus at the end is so well known now, it's hard for him to even, you know, move and around stuff, and set him up in the desert places, and they came to him from every quarter. So we come here now, it says here, and again, he entered into Capernaum, you know, that's kind of where he kind of made his home, where Peter was after some days, and it was noise that he was in the house. And straightway, many were gathered together in so much that there was no room for them, no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door. And he preached the word unto them, and they came unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was born of four, and when they could not come nigh unto him from the press, in other words, the crowd, they uncovered the roof where he was, and when they had broken a nub, they let down a bad brim the sick of the palsy lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he sent unto the sick of the palsy, saying, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. And there were certain of the scribes sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, you know, isn't that amazing? Here in this crowd, there are some hearts that were very, very ungodly. Here they are just looking for a reason to cause trouble, looking for a reason, observing just with a critical spirit, you know, and sadly, they can be in a church, someone comes just to be a critic, but there were certain of the scribes sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, why does this man thus speak blaspheming? Who can forgive sins but God only? See, they knew exactly what Jesus was saying he was. Jesus said, I am God, you know, and that made them angry because they didn't want to receive it except that, and immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye of these sayings in your hearts? Whether it is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and take up thy bed and walk. But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins. He said to the sick of palsy, I say unto thee, Arise and take up thy bed and go thy way unto thy house, and immediately he arose, took up his bed, and went forth before them all, insomuch that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this faction. Isn't that amazing? You know, I love that. You know how exciting when God's moving in the hearts of people. When you have a revival, you know, it's not about one person. It's about what God is doing in the hearts of people. And your testimony has brought tears to my eyes. You know, man, isn't that great? Somebody cared enough to go out and make that extra effort, and here he is in church today, almost waiting ahead on the sight of somebody who cared for his soul. You know, I had one psalmist who said, There's no way I cared for my soul. You know, tonight, that's why we're here. We're one beggar telling another beggar before we found bread telling people. I thank God I was blessed to grow up in a Christian home. And I tell you, I didn't have to make us go to church. We loved church. We loved revival meetings. Loved evangelists. You know, that was just kind of the highlight of the year, really. It was like the Super Bowl, you know? And I just thank God. We were poor. It was just like church mice. There were six kids we were poor so we could get out. But I tell you what, I remember I was a little boy. I had my own little horn, you know? I won't tell you. Because there was an evangelist. He blew up. He had a horn. And I would not get out in the middle. I wanted to be like him. I tell you what, that's the kind of heros you ought to be wanting your kids to have. My friend today, if you don't get them in church, if you don't build up the man of God, if you don't build up authority in your life, it will come back to bite you like you've never seen. Go ahead and teach your children disrespect to pastors, to the president, to police.
Andrew Tate Motivational Speech
A highlight from MAKE IT HAPPEN - Andrew Tate Motivational Speech
"You can't pour from an empty cup and before you give love to anybody else you have to truly love yourself And I think the easiest way to love yourself as a man is to be proud of yourself and to be proud of yourself You have to decide who you want to be inside of the metaverse inside of the matrix You decide the character you want to be and try your best to achieve it Why do you think people struggle with being proud of themselves? I think because they know they're failing I think that most people failing in life know very well they're failing and it doesn't matter what avatar you decide to absorb or Who you decide to be? You can decide to be it and you know true in your heart if you're giving a hundred percent of your energy towards becoming or Doesn't matter if you want to become a famous musician does not gonna come ball a bodybuilder doesn't make them come become a pro fighter It doesn't matter what you want to be You know in your heart if you're actually trying you have to decide what you want to be and try and become it and a lot Of the people who are genuinely unhappy or miserable in their hearts know they're not trying well And they also I think they also focus on what everyone else is doing right or wrong and then judging outward and everyone's like focus on this our reflection of like what that person has and versus what they don't have and it's all just like Cycle of negativity completely and it's just if we found ourselves especially with social media nowadays We found ourselves like most people because maybe they're not mentally strong enough to understand like wait I need to create my own value instead of looking outwards How do you think we fix it successful is all about self -definition which is what I was saying at the beginning We have to defy decide who you want to be and if you're if you wanted to be Joe Schmoe and you pull it off And you'll be a pretty happy content person to decide who you want to be I think the people who are miserable is the dip it's the gap between their expectations and their reality That's what the misery lies. My expectations were always enormously high even when I was a nobody I knew I had to be filthy rich and a kickboxer at the age of 15 I knew that if I'm the kind of guy that if I raise my voice people are gonna care I'm not gonna be the guy who starts shouting and everything's just funny I know I'm gonna be the kind of guy who's genuinely a formidable opponent all around the human endeavor I know I'm gonna have money People who are miserable are the people who don't try hard enough to obtain it because I actually believe and it's another thing I believe the universe is very giving I think the universe and God himself is very giving I've yet to meet someone years All my who is genuinely giving 100 % of themselves day after day doesn't snake anyone firm handshake Look you in the eye doesn't lie to nobody and tries 100 % doesn't get what they want I've never seen it every single person who doesn't have what they want There's something in their story that doesn't quite add up I've yet to see some guy who have you ever seen a guy who eats right trains his ass off and never misses gym session Ever not grow. It's just that's the way the universe works, right? So if you're truly about it, you're truly trying your absolute best You're gonna do it and I that's what I believe. I believe the universe is extremely giving So when I meet somebody and they go I really wanted this and I don't have that so you didn't really want all like the successful People most successful people in the world Would you say that all of them have have like something in common in the sense of like some sort of hardship in their life? It's not I mean trauma is extremely important and this actually goes back into answering the first part of your question, which is interesting There's a study I read about stress and it was saying that stress they Stress has a placebo effect attached to it because the placebo effect is extremely powerful So they found some of the most stressed people in the world and they split them into two groups and they're all equally stressed They all have a bunch of cortisol People who believed they were that stress was bad for you and that stress can hurt you and they believe those media articles We're dying earlier. They're having heart attacks and having stress related illnesses The people who believe the opposite who just said stress is part being successful I like stress when I feel stressed I do my best makes me anxious. It turns my brain I like being stressed lived longer than average point is the same drug how you look at it and how your body Anticipates it how you feel about it affects the real -world results, which goes back into what you were saying earlier about the jealousy You're saying people look on social media and they get jealous and it demotivates things That's because they decide to be demotivated by it Do you know what happens when I get jealous of somebody I fucking beat them If I look at somebody has something I got I will take it from them by hook or by crook. Well, then I love I wish someone could make me jealous. It's hard. Now. I got everything I wish I could look at somebody and go fucker would you say would you say jealous? He's the number one part for motivation? Well, I don't think motivation is a real thing, I don't believe in motivation it's a concept I think discipline is real and I also think discontentment is real and I don't think it's possible for anybody to stay in a scenario Where they're truly uncomfortable if you fall asleep on your arm and your arm really starts to hurt even in the deepest sleep You're gonna wake up and move your arm if you sit there and your life has been in a rut for seven years You are semi comfortable in that rut. Sure. There's days. You're pissed off sure You're semi annoyed by it, but there's also days when you just play video games eat pizza and you're kind of cool with it It's no big deal if you were truly Unhappy and uncomfortable and discontent with your scenario. You wouldn't be in it. So I think I don't believe there's anybody who's truly When I was broke, I couldn't sleep Sam. Please understand me when I was broke. I couldn't sleep I'd be trying to go to bed thinking How the fuck these people have Ferraris. I want a fucking Ferrari I couldn't sleep people aren't taught to be self -aware anymore People are taught to just like like I said look at that guy what he has and be mad that she don't have it Or like if something's going on with me I don't want to look inside and say what's actually happening with me. Why am I this way? Why am I the person that I am today everyone, but I want to figure out deeply How do you think a man specifically in this case is able to look at themselves more comfortably without? Holding the judgment the fact that they don't have the stuff over themselves because completely you're totally right I think there's two answers to the question one I think a lot that came from chess because chess is the most ruthless game on the planet and what chess will teach you Chess teaches you that if you lose at some point you made a mistake It doesn't matter if it's the smallest mistake It doesn't matter if you just took too long too long to think to make the right move and run out of time on the clock At some point you fucked up for you to lose that game. It's 100 % accountability with no luck That's what's so important about learning chess That's the first thing and the second thing is you need to as a man adopt the mindset that absolutely everything that happens to you It's completely an earlier fault whether it's good or bad Most men don't have that when the matrix was attacking me and they were destroying me and they're calling up My ex is trying to get fake fucking charges on me and put me in jail when they closed my bank accounts I use ten eleven million dollars when they banned me on all across all social medias and lie about me when they harassed my Family when did I'm sitting there going? This is my fault. All of this is me. I got here. It's my fault I'm not going that was unfair. It was orchestrated NGOs worked against me because that is not helpful. It's accountability It's a hundred percent accountability in all things, but also when I go out there and I start to Bugatti It's like that's me. It's Mike. This is my fault The car is my fault and the big house is my fault and everything that ever goes wrong Yeah, absolutely. You have to take complete in our accountability for everything. You can't make excuses ever There's never an excuse and you're right people try and put things on the outwork outwards on the outside. It's interesting I remember watching Forrest Gump about five years ago I was on a plane and coming where I was flying and the beginning of Forrest Gump has a scene in it when he's sitting On the bench at the beginning think about a Forrest Gump He's sitting on the bench at the beginning and there's a feather and on him and the movie begins what they're saying with that is Forest is the feather and life has just pushed him all over and put him in all these unusual scenarios Life has directed him everywhere That's what that's what it's saying And if you're gonna be the guy and you're gonna allow life to happen to you and you're not gonna happen to life Then you're at mercy of the wind. Perhaps it might work out. Okay, but it might not right So you have to be the guy who goes? Okay, the winds blowing in this direction. Fuck them. I'm doing this You have to come to life You can't let life come to you because if you let life come to you Then you're gonna be living inside of a matrix and a system which is designed not for you to live your best life It's designed for you to comply How do you think men can build more confidence in like deciding their life instead of just letting be decided for that? Yeah, so they have to take absolute responsibility, which is the first thing the second thing they have to get competence and competence It's gonna allow you to have confidence. You're not gonna be good at shit. You're bad at shit You have to be good at things. You're only gonna be confident things if you're good at things I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at So you have to go out there and take risks you have to make mistakes and you have to risk it all and and once Again, this comes down to competition. I think competition is such an important thing in the masculine world I grew up in the chess world, but I went fighting world was all extremely competitive. It's competition driven You can't make excuses if I sit here and say I lost a fight cool You lost a fight, but I lost a fight but my gloves when they were wrapped up my gloves My hand was hurting and then excuses like you have to understand that excuses don't matter Nobody cares life's binary winners or losers and you just have to take absolute responsibility for people are so caught up when things happen This is why this happened to me because of this because my childhood cuz my past trauma cuz my life whatever But people are so not taught to like look inwards and go towards those things Well, I think I think victim playing victim is a it's an easy way out. Yeah, it's it's a lazy This is an easy way out It's a good excuse and it also makes you feel better about yourself me and my brother have another thing We do we do this all the time if either of us are ever complaining about anything We say we have this we shut each other up and saying what do you want therapy? If you don't want therapy what you're talking the main reason people complain about things is to get a dopamine rush, right? I'm unhappy but if I sit there and I complain about it and you give me a little bit sympathy I feel better dopamine That's why they're complaining for dopamine if someone comes to me and complains about something It's the best thing I can do for them because I'm a philanthropic nice man. I'm mr. Nice. It's time to get fucked I don't care shut up But a lot of this comes down to your social circle because there's a whole bunch of guys out there whose friends accept excuses If your friends will allow you to make excuses, you're gonna make excuses if you're a family and let you make excuses You're gonna make excuses. You're gonna complain and feel better You gotta be around killers who don't accept that shit if I have a good me and my let's say me and three friends There's four of us and we all decide to do 10 ,000 push -ups a day and all of us do them except one There's no words inside the human language There's no sentence He could possibly construct my how compenduous or concise or how intelligent the man is that will allow us to forgive him failing Don't accept excuses.
Abundant Encounters
Moving to Selma Changed Our Lives: Unexpected Blessings, Unprecedented Favor
"Experienced a lot of favor in my life since becoming a Christian. That was really eye -catching and obvious. But one of the most powerful experiences that my wife and I have ever had was when we decided to follow our peace and move to Selma, Alabama. It was in 2020 so things were weird for everybody. So we just went with it. We were like, I don't know what's going on. And we had this elaborate plan to move to the beach. And Selma is not a good alternative to the beach. Selma is an impoverished area. It's a beautiful history and civil rights and just so many reasons to visit. But a hard place to go and live for sure here in America. And for American standards, it's actually a very impoverished area. And just it feels like you're in a real hard third world country on days. And so it's not an easy decision to move to Selma, Alabama. Especially when the beach was on the table. We actually had jobs lined up and everything there. But we just knew that we didn't have peace. And as disappointed as I was that there was no peace in moving to the beach, I just knew, okay, my wife is not having peace. I'm not having peace. What is the story here? God, what do you want us to do? And he basically explained to us that he wanted us to move to Selma. Through peace, that was his communication tool. So the thought of Selma came up. We thought, what about Selma? And our peace returned. And that contrast allowed us to make a decision that we should call our friend in Selma and see if there was anything that he needed us for. And of course, he did. He had an internship that we could move right into. And we had some money saved up, and so we moved. And the at very beginning, we noticed a tremendous amount of favor. It was unlike the place that we had been where, as some might say, the grace had kind of lifted a little bit in our previous situation, which had let us know that we needed to move on. But when we came into Selma, there was so much favor. People had genuine joy for us to even be here. We just felt like, wow, we made the best decision ever in moving. Because people were so wholeheartedly received us. And ever since we've lived here, my wife and I bought our first house here. And we've made good money here, and we've helped a lot of people. We've just done amazing things for the Kingdom of God, and we've been a part of so many things here. And we've built organizations and established different things here that are flourishing now. And I've never experienced favor like
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MARKETS DAILY: Featured Story | Vote if You Want, but Remember Cypherpunks Write Code
"This episode of Markets Daily is sponsored by CME Group. Cypherpunks write code. We will be using Wondercraft AI Voice for this episode. Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest presidential hopeful with an appeal for the crypto class. Speaking at Mainnet, the New York City -based crypto conference put on by Massari, the breakout Republican candidate said he will soon announce a comprehensive crypto policy framework meant to address current gaps in regulation. And so he may. The mandate is reportedly about three quarters complete. And if the plans are as serious and thoughtful as promised, may Ramaswamy's policies serve as a guiding light for those already in or seeking power. There's a reason he's known as the right's answer to Senator Liz Warren. It has nothing to do with his Indian heritage. And a little wonkism might benefit blockchain's chances on the hill. On a practical level, thinking about crypto politically is almost certainly a waste of time. And more importantly, once you start basing decisions around what the government will allow in reference to crypto, the game is lost. I'm saying this at a time when the sitting US president has more or less declared war on crypto, and when the nation's top regulators are circling the pack routinely picking off choice targets one by one. I know there are legal threats to crypto's existence in the US and real implications of regulatory indecision. Developers shouldn't fear prison simply for publishing code. But engaging in the political process as a means of ensuring crypto's future is to miss the point of crypto so hard it's almost embarrassing to have to write this column. Crypto doesn't need political support. It just needs to be built in a way that rises above politics. This isn't even an ideological argument. It's the practical reality of blockchain as we know it. Projects that rely on staying in the good graces of regulators, executives, and judges should be assumed dead in the same way a vulnerability in code should be exploited. There's a reason why Bitcoin has stayed around, yet projects like LBRY have been wiped off the map. If a project has a vulnerability, it will be exploited. And all crypto projects are exposed to the vagaries of the law. The Biden administration has undoubtedly been tough on crypto, but there is no reason some future president won't be worse. Gary Gensler was expected to be pro -crypto, and look at how that turned out. If blockchains are truly meant to sustain themselves for centuries, why expose them at all to four -year election cycles? I'm not going to say that the work of elected politicians like Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand, who are advancing some of the most pro -crypto legislation to date, isn't appreciated, or that Representative Tom Emmer isn't a true believer in crypto. Lobbyists at the Blockchain Association have argued the short -term success of crypto will be determined by getting pro -crypto butts in seats. However, there is no telling whether pro -crypto politicians or regulations won't do even more damage than crypto's critics and antagonists, like the negative impact that mega -donor Sam Bankman -Fried's preferred set of rules would have had by protecting his likely fraudulent exchange, FTX. At least crypto's enemies help crypto cut its teeth.
Markets Daily Crypto Roundup
A highlight from Featured Story | Vote if You Want, but Remember Cypherpunks Write Code
"This episode of Markets Daily is sponsored by CME Group. Cypherpunks write code. We will be using Wondercraft AI Voice for this episode. Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest presidential hopeful with an appeal for the crypto class. Speaking at Mainnet, the New York City -based crypto conference put on by Massari, the breakout Republican candidate said he will soon announce a comprehensive crypto policy framework meant to address current gaps in regulation. And so he may. The mandate is reportedly about three quarters complete. And if the plans are as serious and thoughtful as promised, may Ramaswamy's policies serve as a guiding light for those already in or seeking power. There's a reason he's known as the right's answer to Senator Liz Warren. It has nothing to do with his Indian heritage. And a little wonkism might benefit blockchain's chances on the hill. On a practical level, thinking about crypto politically is almost certainly a waste of time. And more importantly, once you start basing decisions around what the government will allow in reference to crypto, the game is lost. I'm saying this at a time when the sitting US president has more or less declared war on crypto, and when the nation's top regulators are circling the pack routinely picking off choice targets one by one. I know there are legal threats to crypto's existence in the US and real implications of regulatory indecision. Developers shouldn't fear prison simply for publishing code. But engaging in the political process as a means of ensuring crypto's future is to miss the point of crypto so hard it's almost embarrassing to have to write this column. Crypto doesn't need political support. It just needs to be built in a way that rises above politics. This isn't even an ideological argument. It's the practical reality of blockchain as we know it. Projects that rely on staying in the good graces of regulators, executives, and judges should be assumed dead in the same way a vulnerability in code should be exploited. There's a reason why Bitcoin has stayed around, yet projects like LBRY have been wiped off the map. If a project has a vulnerability, it will be exploited. And all crypto projects are exposed to the vagaries of the law. The Biden administration has undoubtedly been tough on crypto, but there is no reason some future president won't be worse. Gary Gensler was expected to be pro -crypto, and look at how that turned out. If blockchains are truly meant to sustain themselves for centuries, why expose them at all to four -year election cycles? I'm not going to say that the work of elected politicians like Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand, who are advancing some of the most pro -crypto legislation to date, isn't appreciated, or that Representative Tom Emmer isn't a true believer in crypto. Lobbyists at the Blockchain Association have argued the short -term success of crypto will be determined by getting pro -crypto butts in seats. However, there is no telling whether pro -crypto politicians or regulations won't do even more damage than crypto's critics and antagonists, like the negative impact that mega -donor Sam Bankman -Fried's preferred set of rules would have had by protecting his likely fraudulent exchange, FTX. At least crypto's enemies help crypto cut its teeth.
The Charlie Kirk Show
A highlight from Defund the University Beast: Charlie and Dennis Prager Return to ASU After Controversy
"Hey, feeling unsure about your finances these days? You're not alone. That's why Noble Gold Investments is here to help. Just hear it straight from the people who they've helped. The Noble crew walked me through everything with no stress. With their help, I could finally sleep easy at night. And now this month, Noble Gold Investments is handing out a free 5 -ounce silver America the Beautiful coin if you qualify for an IRA. Invest in gold and silver with Noble Gold Investments. Go to noblegoldinvestments .com right now. That is noblegoldinvestments .com right now. Happy Sunday. No advertisers in this episode. This is brought to you by Turning Point USA, the nation's most important organization. That's tpusa .com. Turning Point USA is on the front lines trying to ensure that your kids and grandkids can live in a free society. tpusa .com. That is tpusa .com. Dennis Prager and I have a very fun conversation at Arizona State University. We also take questions from the audience on all sorts of different topics. It gets really lively at one point. So enjoy. Get involved with Turning Point USA. tpusa .com. That is tpusa .com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created. Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandtodd .com.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from BKL496 St. Therese, the Little Flower Building a Kingdom of Love with Msgr. John Esseff
"Discerning Hearts provides content dedicated to those on the spiritual journey. To continue production of these podcasts, prayers and more, go to discerninghearts .com and click the donate link found there or inside the free Discerning Hearts app to make your donation. Thanks and God bless. Discerninghearts .com presents Building a Kingdom of Love Reflections with Monsignor John Essif. Monsignor Essif is a priest of the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He has served as a retreat director and confessor to St. Teresa of Calcutta. He continues to offer direction and retreats for the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity. Monsignor Essif encountered St. Padre Pio, who would become a spiritual father to him. He has lived in areas around the world serving in the Pontifical Missions, a Catholic organization established by Pope St. John Paul II to bring the good news to the world, especially to the poor. He continues to serve as a retreat leader and director to bishops, priests and sisters, seminarians and other religious leaders. Building a Kingdom of Love Reflections with Monsignor John Essif. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. What's on my mind is such a, such a humble and beautiful saint, the little flower of Jesus, St. Teresa. The story of the little flower is so powerful in itself. It's so contra what our modern day sees as successful. First, like she goes to a Carmelite convent and, you know, people of our day say, well, she buried her talents, she buried her life, and even the idea of prayer being contributory to the world and its happiness. The little flower spent eight years in a Carmelite convent, a very short life. She died at 24. Even when she was in the convent, the sisters hardly knew anything about her life of holiness. She had kept a journal, her autobiography. She was asked and in fact ordered to write it by her superior. The wisdom of that book, I know, and I was in the seminary in the 40s and the 50s. Her story of a soul is one of the most popular spiritual books and it's so simple. She is the saint of the ordinary. She transforms every act of her life into an act of love and also a desire to unite her prayer with the sacrifice of her love. She became a victim of love for souls. Her whole desire during those eight years was to save souls for God through prayer, through sacrifice, through love. The hiddenness of her life, in fact, when she died, her sisters, who didn't know the depth of her love and her sanctity, said, what are we going to say about her? She has done nothing extraordinary, nothing that would catch the attention of anyone. She takes something like the rattling of the beads, which drove her crazy. She was so highly sensitive and some nun would rub the beads up against the bench in back of her and it would cause her like chalk on a blackboard and that's what would do with her system. She used that as an act of sacrificial love and transformed it and took it as an occasion and an opportunity to offer a sacrifice to God. The crankiest and the most rejecting of all the sisters, she would see them and embrace their rejections. I was just recently with a priest. His face would crack if he would smile. He was so unhappy. It's amazing and just to be around him, it was like pus oozed from his system of unhappiness. He wanted to know everybody to know just how unhappy he was and he would want to make everybody as unhappy as he was. And even to stand next to him, you know, what an opportunity that would be that St. Therese would say, why don't you just give him love and offer him the love so that he could have an opportunity to love. You know, just being around a person who's angry, upset all the time. So all of us have these opportunities in our day and the scripture in the mass that Jesus taught us, the church is teaching us on her feast, the disciples came to Jesus with the question, who is the greatest, most important in the kingdom of God? He called over a little child and stood him in their midst and said, I assure you, unless you change and become like a little child, you will not enter the lowly. Becoming like this child is the greatest and most important in the kingdom of God and the heavenly reign, the simplicity and the humility of a child. Now I believe in order for us to see a child who just simply looks at you with simple love. And so therefore, I really believe what Jesus is looking at is a little, little child in our society. Take today and see where in your neighborhood, in your family, look at a child. My cousin, Christine, of baby, she was so sweet, Olivia, just her eyes, her every smile, everything that would come into that child's face would be some of the most beautiful things that I could remember. I think that's the kind of child this was that our Lord meant in the gospel. There's a prayer. I was with my cousin and he had been making an avina to know what job he should take. And his favorite saint, and she is a favorite saint of so many, was the little flower. He would say this prayer to God through the intercession of St. Teresa. And she claimed, those who are devotees of St. Teresa claim, that they receive a rose or would have a rose as a sign that their prayer would be answered. And he made an avina and he got not only a rose, but his wife had given him this 30 roses. She didn't know that he was doing this, saying these prayers. He got an offer for a job that was absolutely unable to refuse. It was so powerful a sign right after he had received this bouquet of roses. And it was a sign to him that he should change his job. So many that I've talked to, the beautiful example of the little flower of humility, simplicity, childlikeness, and the prayer. My mother's middle name was Cecilia Teresa Esef. It's on her tombstone. She had this tremendous devotion. In fact, she gave a middle name to my sister Marlene. Marlene is Marlene Therese and also Mayanne Therese. And she had great devotion to the little flower. And she herself was a third -order Carmelite. And she had a way about her. My mother's prayer was very powerful for all of us. All of us, my cousins and so many people in our family. She never was out there. She wasn't someone who got into the mother's in school or in the altar and rosary in the parish or outside the family. She had five children. When I was a little boy, I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I would see my mother on her knees. I thought every mother did this. When she would take us for a walk, she would stop in the church and she would make the Stations of the Cross. And we would kind of be there with her. But we just took for granted. That's what mom did. All her life, her entire life, her rosary, her prayers. And she had this power about her. Not really being noticed. But in our family, I would say, everyone who would refer to my mother would say she was like the holiest person they had ever met at her death. That's what she was known for. Prayer, humility, and childlikeness. She had a simplicity about her. And I saw this characteristic in some. When a person has this hiddenness, this characteristic of trusting in the power of prayer. Although the little flower never left her caramel and died at the age of 24, she has been known all over the Catholic world as the patroness of the missions. She is the saint of Vietnam.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
BKL496 St. Therese, the Little Flower Building a Kingdom of Love with Msgr. John Esseff - burst 1
"She is the saint of the ordinary. She transforms every act of her life into an act of love and also a desire to unite her prayer with the sacrifice of her love. She became a victim of love for souls. Her whole desire during those eight years was to save souls for God through prayer, through sacrifice, through love. The hiddenness of her life, in fact, when she died, her sisters, who didn't know the depth of her love and her sanctity, said, what are we going to say about her? She has done nothing extraordinary,
Demo 1 - NaviLens
NASA's James Webb Telescope Fully Deploys Its Primary Mirror
"NASA's next great observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has fully deployed its primary mirror for the first time, marking another milestone on the journey to space. Before all work on the next generation instrument, which is scheduled to launch sometime in 2021, was paused due to the COVID -19 pandemic, technicians and engineers at the agency were going through a series of tests with the telescope before it was sent off to board the Arane 5 rocket. Now, recently in one of these tests, the Space Telescope successfully extended and unfolded its entire 21 -foot, 4 -inch primary mirror, the largest mirror of its kind that NASA has ever built. The mirror opened up into the same configuration that it will once the telescope is in space. During the test, Webb's mirror was hooked up to specialized gravity offsetting equipment that simulated the zero -gravity environment in space. So, not only did the mirror deploy as designed, it did so in a space -like environment, demonstrating its readiness. Engineers and technicians will deploy Webb's primary mirror only one more time before it's shipped off to its launch site. Passing this test is another significant milestone showing Webb will deploy properly in space. This is a great achievement and an inspiring image for the entire team. Webb's primary mirror is a critical piece of the instrument. A telescope's sensitivity is directly related to the size of its mirror, which determines how much light the telescope can collect from the objects that it
Demo 1 - NaviLens
Alphabet's DeepMind AI Will Outperform You at These Video Games
"Having AI agents learn how to play simple video games is an ideal way to test their effectiveness thanks to the ability to measure success via a score. Alphabet's DeepMind designed 57 particular Atari games to serve as a litmus test for its artificial intelligence and established a benchmark for the skills of an average human player. The company's latest system, Agent 57, made a huge leap over previous systems and is the first version of the AI that outperforms the human baseline. In particular, Agent 57 has proven its superhuman skills in Pitfall, Montezuma's Revenge, Solaris, and Skiing, all those games that have been major challenges for other AIs. Now according to MIT's Technology Review, Pitfall and Montezuma's Revenge require the AI to experiment more than usual in order to figure out how to get a better score. Meanwhile, Solaris and Skiing are difficult for AI because there aren't as many indications of success. The AI doesn't know if it's making its right moves for long stretches of time. DeepMind built upon its older AI agents so that Agent 57 could make better decisions regarding exploration and score exploration as well as to optimize the trade -off between short -term and long -term performance in games like Skiing. Technology Review notes that while these results are impressive, AI still has a long way to go. These systems can only figure out one game at a time right now, which it says is at odds with the skills of a human. True versatility, which comes so easily to a human infant, is still far beyond AI's
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"Third resource will also mention this notion of being a fixed victim. A growth leader. Did he say leader something like that. What that triggered in my mind is some of the foundational work on fixed and growth mindset by carol dueck all just linked to a book really quick her some of her foundational work in her book but really just google fixed and growth mindset. There are some really interesting results that have been found in literature about what it means for us to cultivate a growth mindset and one thing that i want to highlight in particular is her use of the word yet. So let's say we are having to do something at work or we're trying to maybe you to give a speech right and you're finding that it's difficult for you and you're starting to get a little bit self critical and you're having a tough time. Motivating yourself to continue on so many times. It can be easy for us to say. Oh i just can't do this. I'm not good at it or oh this is so hard for me i just. I'm not good at this carols work instead of using that fixed mindset as though your abilities in that area are set they cannot be changed they cannot be improved instead what she says is cultivate a growth mindset. Where oh you know what. I'm not good at this yet. That yet opens the door and reminds us. I can get better. I can actually practice this. And this comes into place as we're thinking about changing our own habits moving from a failure habit to a success habit man. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing the success habit yet. So give yourself the slack and cut yourself a break to understand that what you're doing is difficult and use some of these tools like carol dwags lovely word yet to help yourself stay in the game to not quit just because things are getting difficult. Of course they're difficult where human beings right so a link to carol book in the episode description..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"So the app is going to be again. I mentioned earlier games occasion so the app is gonna help gamma phi. It's gonna make on an addictive but in a good way to where when you level up on screen you're also leveling up in real life. So you're you're a rocket ship and you've got these five course of your engine and you need to in order to break earth's gravitational paulie and get enough thrust to get off the ground you gotta start slowly stopping those failure habits and replacing them success habits and you have to start doing this in each of your five course so if you don't wanna fly off into the wrong planet in the wrong galaxy. Wanna stay on course. You're gonna be meeting aliens different planets in different galaxies biting roy fields and You know it's going to feel very you know like oh wait. I can't wait to get to that. But you have to actually start taking these actions in finding balance each of these course and you know slowly but surely like. I said it's a very simple slow process if you try to do it all at once. It's never gonna work gist of it. Yeah i love that. I love that. Where can people get notified about that when it's coming. My website of more momentum mo argie momentum dot com You just sign up to be on the the weekly email that i sent out Or hand or you can just go at the game of fire life tab. There's actually an app but just click on the button. It will say sign up for the beta version of the app. So that's hopefully can be ready in the next couple months and you'll get notified when it is and all you'll get the free download that's great. I'll make sure that we linked to that in the resources. Section of this episode descriptions. If you're on your mobile device you can just swipe up and Be able to click into that so that you can get notified when this app comes out for fas awesome. It was so great to have you back for a second time. I'll make sure we linked to our first conversation to we dove into some different things. They are as well Got even deeper into some of the habit change literature which i love but this is really great. I appreciate you taking the time of being here. april always. A pleasure. Feel you could talk for for hours and hours. An hour so But again our our society is not. Set up for that yeah. I am thirty to forty five minutes. Snippets is about all people can handle. So i hope people got some good nuggets. Thank you so much again for having me on. It was great. Yeah you bet and friends are listening to this. I'll be back in just a second with some thoughts about a few ways that you can go deeper if you're interested in continuing to explore on this topic or learning a little bit more so we'll be right back You.
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"I love it. I actually really liked the term. Fake it till you make it. And here's why. I'm gonna use a used. The example that i i get the strongest reaction with when we talk about Self compassion. there's there's not an area in re in psychological research that's probably getting more attention in terms of how protective it is as a factor of you know anxiety and depression and it increases performance. And i mean all these amazing things if you can learn the self compassion equation. There's there's three parts to it as formulaic. There's a way of applying it to yourself. You have better outcomes but in the beginning the frontloaded part the part that you just talked about it feels fake. You're doing this to yourself and that voice in the back of your mind. That doesn't like the fact that you are uprooting and old habit right. Our mind doesn't give them up easily and that's to your point. The frontloading process. It's part of it. That voice in the back of our mind is trying to say like none another. No we had this one habitual is. I don't want to work hard at this and now you're making me do something new so what it does is tells you come on now. This isn't going to work. This is stupid like you're faking it. You don't believe this now. you can't even tell you. Don't tell yourself this well. I guess this is gonna work right but what's happening is that's your mind just being lazy and trying to not have to work hard to do something new so i love fake it till you make it because that's literally what you're doing. I don't care if it feels fake if it feels inauthentic if it doesn't feel you know true to you and your real voice that's not the point. It's not going to. It's like he's right now. Golf club the first time. All like it's word as your brain has convinced itself that this other path is the right way in not this one So yeah you need to go..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"At it and it still on yesterday's date and driving me crazy and that's like in the back of my mind today. You don't white strongly because you developed his success habit of doing it. Yeah your mind already wants to continue that action which is a great thing right and so you're feeling uncomfortable which you should And so now you're like okay. While i didn't do what i do in. You never wanna miss multiple like okay. One I think we you and i have talked about james clear mcadams. He's got some good stuff. But yet you missed too and that's when things start getting squirrelly because then it's gonna miss joann has three in before you know it because even if you've established a success habit you can undo it. It's unfortunately it's not locked in for life. Some are more locked in july than others. But some you gotta do them but the good news is it gets a lot easier to do though when the totally you mentioned something earlier. That's getting into this right. You mention in passing that they are frontloaded. This shifting from say your morning used to be. My alarm goes off. I hit snooze a few times. I look social media and blast back comments about politics and other things on social media and then i get up and i go about my day that used to be your morning routine. You've mentioned as you're pivoting toward no. I'm gonna set the time that i'm going to get up. I'm gonna stop hitting my snooze button. I'm gonna do this morning routine. Maybe it's the self journal. Maybe it's something else for you Very individualized but you're gonna do this routine. You mentioned the notion that making. That shift is frontloaded. Can you talk about that a little bit so habits you know they they dig themselves in deep like these you know. Think about like these They've got these claws right in there like once they're established your brain can only think about one thing at a time..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"You should be doing this going to work out or or eating better. Now is so much easier to describe the low hanging fruit. And what's what's really going to be the difference. Anyways i mean eating this a natural compounds like you're saying over time people realize that it's like people just tend to see through this tunnel vision and think of just one foot in front of another which i used to do is wow versus like okay wait. There's a ten thousand view here. You have your whole life. So let's let's look at these failure habits and you know what they're doing to your life and how they're causing strife in anxiety angst and unhappiness and replace with the success. Do you find that those failure habits come in clusters. Like i found that for me in and i'm sure you're in this position we all are right. Because we're human we ebb and flow and we go through situations that we slip back into that more fixed are victimized mindset and when i've found myself in that position what i find is i'll make a decision that leans on a failure habit and that triggers the next one to be more likely to be a failure habit because of the repercussions of the first one. Do you notice that hundred percent. Yeah a cont did they. it's called the ripple effects It absolutely does like it. Goes the verse. The reverse way as well and i actually in the big scheme of things i call it your success slough berkshire failure loop your success loop. You take an action. Have you have a little bit of success. It makes you feel good. Gives you the warm and fuzzies. Yes this is in my soul. I know this is what i should be doing right. And then it gives you a little bit of extra energy in monks and hopefully then you use that to take another action and then you get that same feeling and then it spreads and two other habits to your other cores and the same thing works in reverse when you've got that failure. Luke gone where you're just stuck in there and you start to get that fixed victim mindset of like. What's the point. If i skipped is not a big deal all of a sudden you're doing this then you're doing this navy start to really go down and doom and gloom when i yeah. What's interesting about that is it..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"You're gonna find something lagging like if you just focus on your current finances. You just go to the gym. And that's everything and you're not working relationships right so you gotta find balance you've got to continually grow build these things and so that's basically what i've decided to to help other people doing other people that were in my situation particularly young adults connor going out in the world would park my supposed to do like there's million things coming out of all these direction social media saying this should do that and it's very easy to be pulled But if you develop the right habits in your life and i call them. Failure verse success. Identify okay. These are the failure habits. I've i've identified now but a big spotlight on them. That are hurting me. They're causing me. Negative momentum causing less happy. These are the ones that. I wanna replace those whiz and it's not easy to frontloaded process but if you put in the discipline you hold yourself accountable that you're able to do that. Then all of a sudden they're working on autopilot for they were against you because once they're set you bring cam focus on multiple things at once so it loves habits because he goes okay. We got that one. We don't have to worry about that. And if it's helping versus hurting you to me nuts everything in it's a cumulative long-term effect it's gonna. It's not gonna happen overnight. But i have this thing. I call equation of life. Which is your belief system. Plus your repeated actions plus time equals who you will become to me. That kind of sums it all up so the thoughts that go through your brain to turn into actions those in turn into habits over time. That's who you're going to become so they're gonna be you're up there you're down here. I love it so much. There's two things. I want to highlight from your story and this is why i wanted you to tell like as you know. I know the back story a bit one. Is that just the change that you went from from literally being in a position where you know. You felt suicidal. You felt like you wanted to end your own life to the point that you're at now that change.
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"And is going to contribute to you know at the end of the day when you're being eulogized at your funeral having a ton of people there and saying all these great things about you and knowing that you know you don't have any regrets at the end you gotta go about things a different way Definitely took me a while to figure out yet. The gist of it is Born in born california to to hippie parents lived in hawaii to level seven. They divorced early My mom was alchoholic and had a raging temper physically in burgling And my dad ended up going on a trip around the world so we we ended up moving to washington. Dc my mom just said she had enough and so we moved to this leg super suburban soccer mom school where i just didn't fit in at all again and so i was like this. Long haired overall spoke pigeon which was like the local language. Because that's what i knew Couldn't even understand me. A lot of the things. I was saying just completely different mindset than a lot of these kids grew up in this. You know higher in suburban neighborhood. And so i i just. I've always been sensitive. And i think that that compounded into me just feeling very insecure and never really finding my groove. And i never really found a good group of friends and i just always felt like i was on the outside looking in like kinda starting to develop that victim mindset. Like what's wrong with me. Why may like why does my brain to be broken blah blah blah. Were coming from that place of like lacking belonging right label. What you're describing is not having a place where you feel like you truly belong. And that's tough for people that's right. Yeah and meanwhile my mom was still pretty craig cray. She could stop drinking at one point but then The the alcohol in just attempt..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"Strategist and i am so glad that you are here. you know. we've all been through a lot over the last eighteen months. And i'm doing a ton of speaking these days and what i'm finding myself talking about a lot is the word voca volgas actually an acronym it stands for volatile uncertain complex ambiguous. And i feel like that really sums up the experience that we've all had over the last eighteen months as we've faced challenge after challenge with this pandemic. now what's interesting is. It can be easy to do the right things to do all the practices that we talk about on this podcast when times are really good. But here's the weird paradox about that. It's important to do them then right. We're we're practicing. We're building habits. Were putting new things in place but when it's even more important to do them is when times are challenging. We know from psychological research that it's actually possible there's a concept called thriving through adversity and we're seeing that play out in the situation that we've all been in one of the biggest biggest differentiator between people who are sort of taken down by the situation that we've all experienced or challenges like it versus people who end up thriving learning and growing from that situation are the habits and the practices that people put in place especially when times are difficult and so that's where today's episode came from. And why i'm so excited to welcome back a guest that we have spoken to in the past on the podcast namely mr wilmore of more momentum. Today we're gonna be talking about exactly what i just said. How do we take our habits. The things that we sort of fall back on that really don't set us up for success. How do we take those in transition them into more successful habits that support us in the long run will is an expert in this area and he's developed his entire company and the app that he'll be releasing in the coming months around this notion of building habits now. We have a great conversation about how to do that. We also talk a lot about just the reality of how difficult it can be in the beginning. So i don't want you to miss out on that. Lastly right at the beginning of the episode will talks about his own personal story and there are really important things in that personal story. I call them out in the episode as we're talking..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"University dominguez hills. And currently he's completing his dissertation work for his phd in psychology at grand canyon university. He's also a research fellow at stanford university.
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"And they are all experiences every moment we are deciding who we want to be and how we wanna live our life noticing what your brain is doing and then being able to make choices mobilize the things that we know. Lift us up. Fear is not logical. It's primal hello friends and welcome back to the building. Psycological strength podcast. My name is april ciphered. And i'm your host one of the things that i love to do with this. Podcast is to dive into topics and areas. That make us uncomfortable. Not because i want you to feel uncomfortable. But because typically if i can find guests who work in that space i can bring to you the best of the best the most expert people in this area that makes us feel uncomfortable so that we can learn from the best and begin to feel more comfortable begin to have a better experience to be more effective and intentional in that area that we don't typically enjoy working in this week is one of those episodes this week. We are focusing on conflict and conflict resolution. It goes without saying that there is not a single relationship in your life that will be completely conflict-free it just isn't inevitability that at some point somewhere along the line bigger small you'll encounter conflict in your relationships and so knowing what to do is such an important thing especially because conflict and thinking about how to manage it and have those difficult conversations. It's not something that we just as a jumping off point ten to feel confident in doing but the implications of being able to do it. Well are so big the implications for romantic relationships and being able to manage conflict there as a parent or in your job or you know with family members in managing conflict there. The implications are so wide reaching and the impact the most basic thing as our life experience. Right like if we're better equipped and better able to manage conflict and resolve it when it comes up think about the ripple effect that will have in every facet of your life. So i'm excited for you all to join me for this episode because even if you're not in a situation right now where you are in conflict with someone or there's an ongoing issue there certainly will be not to burst your bubble but there will at some point in the future and so. I'm excited that you're here to learn some really great information and seriously good hands on techniques from this week's guest let me introduce them really quick and we're gonna talk a bit about what we into this episode. Because you're not gonna want to miss it so this week. We're talking with jeremy pollack. He is a leader in the field of workplace conflict resolution and peace building. He's the founder of pollick peace building systems and international conflict resolution consulting firm. He's a master coach. A.
The Changelog
"building" Discussed on The Changelog
"Future. This is brought to you by our friends at square parlous. Who's up there building applications square. If you haven't yet you need to check out their. Api explore it's an interactive interface. You can use to build view and send. Heb request call square api's api or less you test. Requests the actual sandbox or production resources inside your account is customers orders and calico objects. You can use the apex. Puerto quickly populate sandbox or production resources in your account then you can interact with those resources inside the dashboard. For example if you use ajax or to create a customer production or sandbox environment the customers displayed in interaction or sandbox solder dashboard. This will is so powerful and will likely become your best friend. When interacting with testing or playing with your applications inside square check the shows links to the dogs or and the developer account. Sign up page or the developer square dot com slash explore slash square. The jump right in again. Six police in the show notes or had a developer square by slash explores last square to play right now..
The Changelog
"building" Discussed on The Changelog
"Building a compiler goer building an interpreter and go or something like that riding interpreter and go by thurston ball. Yeah from thurston. Yeah we've had him on kgo time episode twenty eight way back in the day. He's been on the show a few times. And i haven't read that one. But i've heard a lotta people also vouch for it. Yeah i've looked at some projects sort of sort of That other people both following the book and that also looks amazing and those are quite easy to follow. If you if you know the the base language for those books it's go you can sort of like follow it like any other programming tutorial. That'll sort of teach you the basic concepts of need to now. I know once you build something like the following instructions. It's like follow instructions and the you can start adding pieces and are customizing things to your liking. I think the great thing about Guages as a project is there's so many things to customize in customers its customers the syntax can change how different building functions act and so follow one of these great guides already and sort of like. Hack away at your liking. So you've made mistakes with ink and you now have brought forth inc two point. Oh or this new things on the unnamed project. What are the some of the things that you decided to to change. Or what motivated you to go ahead and write a second new programming language. That's at least. I assume similar inc but different so it's similar in that it's keeping all the things that actually like about around that simplicity and focus on focus on first class functions and closures and called the green. I would not say i'm bringing it forth. It's still kind of under wraps. But i can talk about it a little bit. The reason that i started working on it actually a little embarrassing. It's i got this great chance to give a talk about inc in disappears go on later this year. The organizers asked me to talk about the process of building your own pregnant language ago. And i was like that sounds great. I'd love to talk about it by the code base because it was one of my first major projects because it was my first pregnant. English is kind of hideous. The code is not what. I what i would say super clean. It's not organized. In the way. That i would do if i it and so rather than for that kind of talk rather than rewriting significant parts of ink and spending a lot of my time doing it. It's you know it's a few thousand lines ago. So i'll just kind of while and rewriting the interpreter. Also fix all. The things that i think is wrong with. Currently that ended up being sort of kind of a different language. Incas could have callback based event loop based gyroscope which is where. It's a lot like java script a lot of the sin taxes staying but i'm introducing a few more keywords very heavy on symbols symbols that sort of nice from like it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside that like there was no english keywords and language but it's a little hard to use and so on and do some symbols and words. I'm making certain kinds of built in functions. Little more pragmatic a little less sort of ideological axiomatic like in inc. There is a a read function that reads from file right to file and one of the things. I found difficult building more sophisticated products. Inc was like sometimes you want to keep a handle to a file and read it over and over and over again. Sometimes you want to like truncated files. Sometimes out of writing over it and those things are kind of when you're limited to the case. I'm fixing some of these is. I'm adding like a pipe. Operator to make like chaining function calls e c because we don't have objects and methods so you can't do like a raid. At map map in passing the array but with with a pipe operator you can do array pipe map something pipe filter something so just making it a little more organic. Basically i've in my head. There's mental list of all the things that are high wish worked a little differently from all the projects that building can trying to add them in without succumbing to the pressure of trying to do too many things originally. Yeah so you have that done plus your talk in time for gopher conwright october. I think yeah sometime. In december december december. Yeah no pressure yeah. It's sort of in the back of my mind working time going back to career in what you said. Before when jared ashi in the first part of the show. I think you said he was kind of backwards. Like you're not you're trying to not take. Would you learn at a job back to your side project or sort of taking your side. Partic- your job so back to the career part. You're not like mapping out your career based upon like allama. Do these things to get hired somewhere. You're choosing your career in a way based upon your at least you're not five based upon what you are learning now in your side. Projects could use them there. Is that correct. Yeah that sounds right. Just because i've worked on a lot of things on my side. A lot of the people that i get to meet and talk about the people. That are the things like that. A lot of that ends up being related to what i'm thinking about on the side so when you keep leering on like ink two point oh or things like that. You're not. you're not necessarily doing it so that you can get that foam. Oh job your friend or whatever like purple cow moment in your office. You're you're just trying to keep doing what you do on the side. Sounds like that's what you're optimizing for like you're optimizing for the joy of your side work more so than the joy of your primary work. Yeah i think if you are working on things are these for me. I found that. If i were on things that sort of most fascinating more intellectually sort of excite me on my side. It's always gonna lead to me talking to people that are sort of working on some things so with monocle. It's like a personal search engine that introduced me to a lot of problems into sort of like cracked open this wide world of search as like a general computer science problem space natural language search tuck search and it turns out. There was a lot of people working on search problem. Even outside of google. Dang is a huge space. And i think just building something in it and talking to people about it has opened up a lot of really interesting doors to other people that are working on some of the things in potentially some people. Could i mike brooklyn the.
The Changelog
"building" Discussed on The Changelog
"Let's assume there's some foam author. I dared mentioned on viable in terms of your language. You mentioned his response with that may be true. You know maybe not yet in a maybe at some point we'll be at least right now incas intended to be a linus only language. And you're you're open to hearing ideas but you're not necessarily for contributions etcetera etcetera but to that fact some knowledge of gained while doing the interpreter syntax highlighting. You you've learned things that transcends language. But i'm sure you've got friends in the industry and they're doing things or whatever like have you had any foam. Oh how do you translate your choices to other choices and are you looking for shoulders and thinking man. That's kinda cool down. That's a great question. So when i started out doing sort of building these side personal side projects. That was the legitimate concern. That i had is. I i look around. And there's all these people that are spending their time without working outside to work building these sort of more legitimate feeling legitimate looking production level services scalable and distributed. And all this kind of stuff. and. I'm over here is sort of like saving my data to these jason files in working on personal projects that only really us and for a while. It looked at that. And i was like well. Maybe on practicing skills that are actually useful. But i think over time that fierce went away for a couple reasons. One is people started finding work interesting which i think. Just say what. You will about looking for external validation but i think i needed that some degree of allegation to be like. Hey maybe maybe. The thing that i'm doing is actually not a waste of time. Maybe there is value in it even if it's not sort of the value in the same value as creating these production level services. There's value in other people looking at my projects and being inspired to go build their own versions or there's value in people thinking it's interesting getting interesting off of it. The second realization that had was there was more than one way to practice software engineering and building. Things there's more than one way that programming candy valuable one of them is to build these large scale distributed services that work for the scale. Another way it's like personal tools and kind of present ideas. A lot of my projects are about had this idea of how this should work and here it is and it works for me and look at how it works for. Maybe you can take that idea and build something else. And so i think i realized there's a lot of different ways that writing code can be valuable a lot of different ways to practice the software engineer. I think i have different skill chart than a lot of traditional software engineers. Just because i'm very well practiced on certain things rapid prototyping and certain kinds of domains whereas i'm not as practiced on working data or analytics for things like that and i think that's okay. There's you know you got to fit into a team and to build a good team. You need people that are good at different things. So i think in the end. There's a lot of different ways to be good at your craft. And i think a lot more comfortable in my skin in the particular way that i try to become better at what i do. Well if we're speaking career and talking hiring versus starting something self really trying to impress somebody that you are worthy of role right and whether you spend your time doing production scale. Large data distributed systems or working on personal projects. I think what it comes down impressing upon somebody that you are good at what you do and that you can learn is the fact that you've learned all these things enough so to create your own programming language and then own tooling for all these different aspects of your life and so does it really matter that you type scripting in and out evenly probably do because you work nine to five to entice script. But let's take russ. Is it really matter that you haven't spent the last five years learning rust when you learned enough about programming to be able to write a language that you write all your projects on so. I think there's probably works. Yeah definitely does. I think it's actually funny. I talk about this with some some friends who are more traditionally striven industry. It's actually very hard to impress people doing that. Everyone else is doing. It takes a lot more whereas if you're doing the thing that only the people who are doing like building bunch of person projects it's actually way easier to think the more noticeable and especially the more noticeable to people that you probably want to work with working on the same things so a lot of the people that are get to talk to buildings. Projects are building products or building companies. Working on the same kinds of problems like like searching personal trolling and community which is great. Because i love to work on his problems outside of my type projects even at work. You're the purple cow. Dairy slammed the perfect cow. Yeah seth godin moldable purple cow and essentially. It's be remarkable. If you're like everybody else you're invisible. Stand out in a beat different in those ways. And so in. A world of cows using seth godin language. At least his lingo. I didn't make this up. He did you know in the world of cows be the purple one. If all cows are white and brown and black but mostly white. I guess except for some bulls or whatnot but those are different breed but the point is just a cow a like okay you find child right learns you know animals and sounds you show macau. They're going to go moo right. That's right show them. Perpetuity may go. I don't know what to say about that one because it's purple right be the purple cow. Send out yeah. I like that. I can buy with that got him. He's onboard. be the perfect. Why it's true. I mean if you do the typical path and you get the typical results right. And maybe you're after a typical result. If you want a non normal life then you have to take non normal routes. I think and it seems like. That's what you're doing. You're not i mean how many people have written around programming language probably hundreds. Maybe thousands definitely not hundreds of thousands. It is getting easier. And i would like to push people to do because it is a really fun experience. But i've definitely put into it so if you were starting today to write your own language and someone's like all right. I wanna be a purple cow. I can't believe we're taking this on. I want to be like linus. Linus lee and just specify there. There's a namespace conflict online. And i wanna write my programming language. How would you advise them to start today. Where would they go. Who would they learn from with. Just fork inc. And right fink do yes so there's a bunch of different ways. I think the way that i would recommend. It's close to the way that i kind of went into. It was start with something simple. I i think one of the useless out of context. But i think something. We're complicated now. Simple but specifically. I think it's really hard to know what simple to implement. Like classes inheritance. Seems pretty simple on the outside. So of observations seem bruce on the outside but it's actually not trivial to implement compared to other kinds of features like closures and things like that and closures actually is another example. That's quite difficult to implement depending on whatever you i think. The kinds of languages are quite easy. Beginnings would've permanent orioles will start with this just because of semantic incidents in texas implicity something simple and slowly add pieces on those specifically a lot of great sort of resources and books out there that help the ones that come to mind. I actually have a blog about building your own language to if you build if you search language on google. You'll find it but outside of that the resources that were really helpful to me specifically there is a great book that actually just came out in fiscal copy. This week by bob. Nystrom called coughing. Interpreters probably the single best piece of literature online. It's free all the you can get a physical copy to you about how to build an interpreter and it goes through from the basics all the way up to building something. That's rather sophisticated crafting interpreters. There's another book called..
Building Psychological Strength
"building" Discussed on Building Psychological Strength
"Be and how we wanna last noticing what your brain is dealing and then being able to make choices mobilize the things that we know. Lift us up. Fear is not logical. It's primal hello happy. Wednesday and welcome back to the building. Psychological strength podcast. My name is april ciphered. And i'm your host so many times we talk about building strength. And it is a topic that gets misconstrued because people think things like gratitude practices and some of the work that we do and the techniques that we talk about on. This podcast are akin to pretending like there's no hardship. Bur no adversity in the world. You know we've done past episodes on the difference between a gratitude practice and toxic positively toxic positively meaning a situation where we deny the fact that adverse difficult challenging things will happen in life. We put our rose colored glasses on. And pretend like everything's okay when it's not we ignore are difficult emotions and we move on as though there's something wrong with experiencing hardship in life when in fact it's just a it's a fact of life where psychological strength really comes into play is when the chips are down when it's really tough when life hands you adversity or worse. When you're in a crisis situation psychological strength is something that we practice and we work on and we develop in our day to day lives so that we are strong and we have skills and capabilities when we need them. I'm gonna give a quick analogy. And then i'm gonna talk about why i'm driving in this way. The analogy i wanna give is basketball. We've given this before on the podcast. Let's say that you are a professional basketball player and you want to do well in the upcoming nba championships right. Let's say that that's that's your goal. You're not going to practice. Free throws for the first time during the nba championships. You're not gonna perform very well if that's where you're getting your practice instead you're going to set up the opportunity for you to practice free throw after free throw after free throw outside of the context of when it really matters you're gonna practice these techniques in order to create the muscle memory. You need so that when you're in a high stress situation like the nba championships. When you're in a situation when it really matters when you're performance needs to be on point you can rely on that muscle memory on the strengthen the skill that you developed outside of that during practice you can rely on it and show up and perform in a way that gets you through that situation effectively. I give that example because in our lives you know so many times. It seems like it's not worth it to practice. Mindfulness practice gratitude. Practice having an observing separate relationship with our thoughts practice emotional intelligence and and emotion labeling and all these other things that we talk about on the podcasts. There's so many and we'll dive into a bunch during this episode so many times. We think that work just isn't important in our day to day. Lives but i want to tell you that when you encounter adversity when life hands you.
The Site Shed
"building" Discussed on The Site Shed
"Your customer service representative as owners. We get busy and we trained people one time and then we just assume that they're still doing it. How we train them right so executive ride along. Just take yourself and sit next to him. Hey you're not in trouble. i'm here just to make sure that you have all the tools and the resources that you need even going. It's painful to go out in the field with your guys. It's painful to sit next year office people and see what's really going on because we have to fix little things and tweak here and there and then we can get our value up and get our value up by doing just a little bit more than we did yesterday. Your notes differently true. I mean it's all about improving the process. And i think that's a big thing a lot of people. Don't revisit a lot of these systems. Revisit a of the the processes that they put him plice thinking. Well it's you know it's finished complaint but the reality is everything changes and everything can be improved and to that point. There's a good chance that you'll put somewhat into position that can do something a lot better than you can do it. And that's the heart and so that that whole process that you put them in charge of you should expect them to be able to improve it and you should also give them the flexibility to be able to document an update the processes that you know looking forward you. That's how that's how that task should be delivered. Sorry i think really. When you're looking at value building i'd With confidence like most of the leases watching of view is a watching this or listening to this would not be putting by not putting the amount all the right amount of value into past and present customers. And i know it because this is the spice deal with. I just do it and again. It's not having a go with them. Because i know it's something that's unfamiliar to them like. It's easy google ads campaign because someone else does. It runs fun. But it's different when you have a conversation around. How can we do and value to your existing customers and so we like to create content or work with clients correct content. It's valuable not ramming styles down. They were saying well. What about the project. you just completed. Do you not think able would like to hear about this and say the work that you've been able to do for this person. What if they relate to something similar like there's that whole ecosystem that comes into play that is so regularly neglected and to be honest to strike out relegated on the list of important things and to be done. Yeah he all the time when they come anywhere programs as i if you might be spotting your process it will or is get relegated on the list of important things to be done down to the point where having a ba. At the tomlin fraud author enough to work is going to become more important than filling in this. Four artist. challenge out there to really like to really ripping and mike like just get these things done and you could sit down there for an hour and you can figure out ways that you could add value or you could do something better than you're currently doing rallies you want. Because you'd be you'd rather go home watch tv and many exits just going to happen to you someday and it's not going to be what you wanted to be. I books gonna come along and buy these for billion dollars like it's been again. This is kind of a testament to you. Look at something like instagram. And you look at it. Looks like an overnight success but the amount of work that where where where it wasn't the point of acquisition is all that stuff that you can't say it was a tiny tame. It was like six or seven people on that team at instagram..
The Site Shed
"building" Discussed on The Site Shed
"And you know we'll buy this business for a billion dollars like the most undervalued got. An aso is still a yup and so there's a lot more that goes into the global perspective there spurs. we've we've valued joining from somebody that actually has a deep understanding of what it looks like and i urge you to have a good understanding of what some of those metrics model clock for your business and consider things that aren't obvious. Consider things like okay. Well let's look at ow. Al coward brand representation. How we kicks it in the marketplace we had a way look up against perhaps some competitors cited compare yourself. But i'm just saying it's it's good to have some perspective on the rest of the market looks locks and how you'll position within. What are you what is your. What is your customer contact by. Look like and how do you communicate with them. I mean we deal with style. We have we have programs implies that help. Businesses aren't as try business on his rain with their with their advice. Because i've just got these china board mentality. Enclose never speak to them again until they dropped block again. And i have to call them look sanity and like from she point of view like we run google ads for companies and we all this of stuff and like the budget. You need to run a successful. Google ads company if your eye electrician or a plumber or whatever it might be a huge budget could just get good at reengaging the database. I probably yeah know and it could be as simple as hey. Thank you for letting us go. Provide great service to you today. Saying thank you even as it homeowner so often contractors. Come to our house and they deal with my husband all the time. But i'm the one that's out here in the workforce doing other things talking to people and i'm the social one so if they would just send me. Hey it was great being at your house and send me their card. I'd pass it around to all my friends. We had a patio bill or installed we did the stamped concrete on our patio couple years ago. And it's my favorite thing best contractors we ever had and i could not tell you their names as they never called me. They never sent me anything you know so we have all these missed opportunities to your point. Value building today doesn't have to be difficult but don't turn and burn like nurture your customer base and then start enjoying the revenue increase profits and we can talk about it even in the next episode more. But if you're going to gracefully exit whether you want to stay on as an owner or actually sell out what that looks like a value building today could be as simple as doing one thing. A little bit better than i did yesterday. All right let me take a look at my marketing and let me just step it up. Justin roj all right. Let me take a look at My office my front. Did i used to do this thing. And i did talk once. Matt called the executive ride along. I practicing my team. And i'm happy to give any listeners. The download anytime but it's all you inspect what you expect. We all hear it and we think that. Oh you know. We're so valuable but we trained somebody when they first came on board like. When's the last time you actually did a ride along with one of your technicians. When's the last time you actually did a ride along and went and sat next to your dispatcher..
The Site Shed
"building" Discussed on The Site Shed
"What else can we start offering in the home. When we're their monthly recurring revenue. It's super important. When it comes to value building of your business people that are going to buy it. Potentially water know what your monthly recurring revenue. We don't always have that in service industries and the trades we do have in terms of Mike service agreements. You guys probably have those in australia to write him accustomed. There's also a lot of time somebody looking to buy. Your company will ask you know how many service.