35 Burst results for "Felix"
The Crossover NBA Show with Chris Mannix
A highlight from Clippers Land Harden & Grizzlies Injury Woes
"He's not having to go and You know d up CJ McCollum for example or somebody of that ilk so I think he's gonna be able to To do this pretty regularly And I it had to but I was watching between that first and second quarter like just seeing how calm Golden State was not having to like rush back in like Steph Curry or rush back in Draymond Green or one of their starters you can play Chris Paul and Four reserves and do what they did I think in that stretch They were like plus six between the minute Steph Curry went out and the minute Steph Curry went back on the floor came back on the floor so Rowan I just think this is a You know this has the potential to to me I didn't know if the wars were gonna be better with Chris Paul because Jordan Poole You know did have his moments, and he's an improving scorer and all that stuff But you know this version of Chris Paul if the Warriors stay healthy with their their starting lineup It's a better fit than Jordan Poole is for it's not just a moving one long -term contract for a shorter one It's a better fit than Jordan Poole was I Agree, and I just think it makes everyone's life easier Including Chris Paul. He's still averaging over eight assists a game, which is kind of crazy Right now right now. He's at around roughly 30 minutes a night Which would be a career low, and I'm willing to bet that gets even lower. Yeah, it's just It makes too much sense again. I'm interested to see if he's closing alongside Chris Paul In these closing lineups, I mean it could be moody moody has been fantastic long time in guys I mean yeah, yes as long as I curry could be moody could be comingo So I'm so interested to see who closes because I don't think they're gonna go the Draymond Looney look All the time, but It's a it's a good problem for them to have right now because the time by the way I love that you know even with clay out Steve Kerr put moody in the starting lineup like yeah This is now Chris Paul's role like he's yeah, I'm not gonna jerk him around in and on the lineup You know maybe there's a long -term injury you put him right, but just for short -term stuff You're gonna start somebody else and keep Chris Paul in that spot I think it's only the more time he spends in that role the more comfortable. He's going to be the better. He's gonna be Plus 1 ,300 then plus 1 ,300 that's crazy That's crazy. Who was the who the frontrunners for six man like a manual quickly like I mean It's like the problem is it just always goes to guys who score a lot But it you know, I think it'll be incumbent on they'll be like a hearing kind of touch. Yes They'll be like a nostalgia vote first Yeah They're like top three and Chris Paul's like up there giving you 13 I know seven and five and I think that the like the same way that it took a while for Cy Young winners where you were getting guys that you know, was it Felix? Hernandez one year that had Like he went like 13 and 12 and won the Cy Young and it was kind of threw everybody off That he did or it didn't throw everybody off There were a lot of the new wave kind of new age guys that you know baseball I've always thought was ahead of basketball as far as the way analytics are used and I feel like we're just starting to see that turn with Basketball guys where that have an element of defense to their game I don't know It'll probably still take a while but like the Lou Williams prototype May not win the award for the next 10 years the way it's been for the last 10 or 15 or like Jamal Crawford and god bless him Like I think we all have been fans of him over the course of his career and and stuff but I think that it's starting to shift and I think Brock didn't quickly were kind of of that ill to have like guys that play some defense They put up numbers, too That's where I'm saying and I think quite frankly Rohan pointed it out If Chris Paul at times is not out there as part of their ending five That's the sort of thing I'd see is potentially cutting into his argument of it's a team that is really loaded Also on the wing sometime, you know Just where if he's not part of that that closing five does that hurt his case if he's hurt Because he's Chris Paul and he's older and misses a couple weeks does that hurt his case if someone like quickly is playing 80 games and Scoring more than him and plays really good defense.
Epicenter
A highlight from Simon Harman: Chainflip - Native cross-chain AMM
"Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Felix, and today I'm speaking with Simon Harmon, who is the CEO and founder of Chainflip. Chainflip is a cross -chain decentralized exchange and messaging protocol. Welcome to Epicenter, Simon. So glad to have you here. Likewise, Felix. Thanks very much for having me. Right, so I introduced it a little bit like what Chainflip is already. We're going to obviously talk about that a lot. But as is customary on Epicenter, we like to start a little bit with the history of the guests, how they found their way into crypto. I think for you, it is quite an interesting journey with like many contributions already to like cryptography and crypto economics in general. So like, yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit how you fell into the crypto rabbit hole? Yeah, sure. You know, crypto has been a part of my entire adult life. I just turned 27, but I bought Bitcoin in high school in my last year. Wow, that's coming on for a decade now. That's crazy. And I can't believe that. Yeah, I guess me and my best friend were very interested in politics and economics and things at a very young age. And for some reason, you know, also being very into video games and such and developed a lot of stuff around Minecraft and other games as well. A lot of websites and things like that. That was kind of my high school job. So I don't know, Bitcoin just kind of spoke to us when we were young. And through all the money I was making from website development into Bitcoin for reasons which elude me even today. So, but, you know, that obviously kicked off a massive journey, you know, started university and Ethereum came out and was margin trading on Poloniex at 18 years old. And, you know, this crazy, you know, things for young people to be doing, I guess, but we were kind of crazy. So it makes sense. But I guess, you know, my journey as a crypto founder, I guess, really started after university when I turned when I was 21. And I was very interested in the privacy space, especially at the time, obviously still am. But yeah, the idea of, you know, deploying blockchain networks to do stuff off chain, so to speak, was always something that I thought was quite appealing. And something that people weren't really doing, especially at that time. And so founded a project called Loki, now called Oxen, where we spent, we have spent the last almost six years developing. The main product that we've been developing on top of this network is called Session. It's a secure messaging app, uses similar encryption to Signal, but it's all deployed on a fully decentralised network backed up by about 1200 independently run service nodes, they're called, like validators, basically. And we have like this sharded distributed storage system. And I think we're coming up on like five million downloads now. I think about 800 ,000 monthly active users. So, you know, after many years of development and a lot of pain. Now, finally starting to see this get adopted in all sorts of crazy ways. There was, you know, the Iranian protest movement last year that really kicked off the adoption of Session and, you know, getting random emails from like the Swiss government saying, oh, hey, guys, I just wanted to say like, we're all using this and enjoying it. So thanks. Keep up the good work. Which, yeah, after so many years of developing in the bear market and, you know, having a lot of struggles to go through as a result is really awesome to see. I'm not involved on a day to day basis anymore in that project. Still being run by my co -founders, Chris, Key and Josh down in Melbourne, Australia. But a couple of years ago, I moved here to Berlin to take on Chain Flip.
Epicenter
A highlight from Guy Young: Ethena - USDe Synthetic Dollar via Delta-Neutral Staked Ethereum Hedging
"Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Felix, and today I'm speaking with Gai Yang, who's the founder and CEO of Ethina Labs. Dina is building EUSD, a delta neutral stablecoin backed by Staked Ether. We're going to dive into what that all means, but yeah, first of all, welcome, Gai. So glad to have you on. Yeah, thanks. Awesome. Yeah. So generally, we start more about your personal journey to crypto, you know, Epicenter is mostly about kind of how did people get into the space, what were their vision or why they're trying to work on future of decentralized finance. So yeah, when we start there, how do you like learn about crypto and get into the space and what did you do before? Yeah, sure. So before crypto, I was working at a hedge fund in the US. They focus primarily on financial services. So we're investing into everything from banks to insurance companies, specialty finance, and that was across the capital structure as well. I had a friend who was a DeFi founder back in 2019, introduced me to Ethereum and to DeFi back then. And it was just something that was immediately interesting to me. And I was investing into it on the side of my day job all the way through until when Luna collapsed. And it was when Luna went down, Arthur came out with his sort of thought piece around how we might think about a more secure and scalable crypto narrative step coin. And that's how we sort of landed with the idea of Athena. Yeah, that's a really interesting post there and sort of origins with Arthur's post and also like he's a founding advisor to Athena. And in the post, if you look through it in the ad, it actually says, right, if I find a team that does this, let's do it. So that recall you guys found each other there, I guess, we'd be curious to hear actually how that went down. Did you reach out to him? You started building it and then later when it had some shape, you were like, hey, Arthur, it's happening? Yeah, that's exactly right. I thought we wanted to flesh out the idea a bit. So you actually had a bit of a game plan and architecture behind the whole thing and a business plan that actually made sense that he could get behind rather than just sort of putting our hands up. So we put that together, had this sort of design and everything ready to go. And then had a connection into Akshat, who's the guy who's running his family office Maelstrom, had a few calls with them and then got introduced to Arthur directly there. Awesome. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So I also like, I guess, for our listeners, I think many people know Arthur Ace, right? It's like BitMax founder and like a sort of person that's very famed in the crypto space around macroeconomics and trading in general. And he wrote this post called, actually, I don't know, Dust on Crust, I think. It starts about skiing and kind of draws parallels to the crypto space. I think in general, Arthur is a pretty great writer. So I recommend reading some of his blog posts. And it goes into this idea of the NACA dollar, which is essentially sort of a new type of stablecoin that he was thinking about that is based around derivatives and sort of hedging out the price risk of cryptocurrencies. But we'll get into that. I think I wanted to start because I guess stablecoins, like huge topic. You also already mentioned Luna there, right? In general, stablecoins seem to be one of the kind of use cases of crypto that has gotten the most traction. So yeah, I wanted to kind of get your view of the history of stablecoins in the space. What did you find interesting and what was lacking, like going from DAI and these sort of like more centrally backed stablecoins? Can you just kind of talk through a bit how you were thinking about stablecoins before you started Ifti now? Yeah, sure. So the history of stablecoins goes all the way back to Tether and it was originally called Realcoin back in 2014. And then they launched officially as Tether on Bitfinex back in January 2015. So that really the key innovation there was a lot of the crypto businesses that existed were really struggling with banking relationships and being able to off -board and to interfere. And really the only innovation that they had there was if Tether could get the right banking rails set up, you only really needed them to be able to do that as sort of an off -ramp to the real world. And then everyone else within the crypto ecosystem could rely on Tether as transactional money within the space. And so that was really the first use case, which was just a trading pair on exchanges. And it's obviously evolved pretty significantly from then onwards. After that, I think actually the origins of Athena was probably the next example of how a stablecoin -like asset sort of surfaced. And so it was actually on Bitfinex where everything was BTC denominated. So single every instrument that in order to margin the derivative required Bitcoin as the collateral asset. And so if you wanted to get into a flower position, they got a short inverse perpetual against that BTC collateral. And that would in effect create a synthetic gold position out of those two things and ending off. And really that's kind of the origin of the Athena story, which is what we're trying to do is tokenize and export that as an actual product rather than just a trade that was sitting on Bitmax. Since those days of Bitmax, I think you saw a few different evolutions going away from the centralized model of stablecoins. So you saw MakerDAO and originally it was called SAI with single collateral being ETH and then move to DAO, which allowed different collateral types to come in there. At a very basic level, what was happening is you're putting up collateral on one side and then you're able to borrow the stablecoin into existence on the other. Really the key moment though for MakerDAO was in the March 2020 crash where the system basically became insolvent with what happened with the price crash in ETH. And in order to actually remedy that situation, they needed to onboard USDC as a collateral asset there. And so I think really that changed the course of history for MakerDAO where they sort of made the decision that they were going to take on centralized assets and that fundamentally sort of changed the actual profile of DAI as an asset going forward. And now you sort of look at it and it's more than 50 percent centralized assets, whether it's or RWAs USDC sitting in there. And then we obviously get to Luna. I think everyone's pretty aware of what went on then, happy to sort of jump into what we think went right and wrong there. But I think it's a pretty well spoken story at the moment. All right. Yeah, totally. I think very interesting to hear that I guess on BitMEX there was already this product there, but I guess it was only on the exchange, right? It didn't make its way into on -chain or DeFi. And that's sort of what you were after, since that also has evolved a lot. So it goes back quite far, which I guess most people maybe don't know. I think you were also mentioning in some of your materials the stablecoin Phrylema. Can you sort of expand on what's the trade -offs that stablecoins generally make and then how Athena fits in that? Yeah. Well, I think Trilemmas are used quite a bit within pitch decks in crypto, I think to make up problems and pretend that we're solving them to get a capital raise. But I think actually the Trilemma as it relates to stablecoins is actually a very real one. So the basic idea here is you've got decentralization, scalability and stability, and you only can really have two of those three components. We personally think that it's a pretty unhelpful sort of definition of the world where if you're focusing on these words, which are just very broad, like decentralization and scalability, it's quite unhelpful to actually say, are you actually attaining those qualities that you're actually after? And so for us, we're trying to think a bit more deeply about what are the more narrow qualities of each of those three pieces that we actually want to try and retain within our product. And what we arrived at is within this decentralization phase, what is actually the base that you're trying to solve for here? And that is actually having censorship resistance. So for us, that meant you don't want bonds or real world assets sitting within SPVs or banking structures in the real world, which a regulator or some of the entities can come in and shut down in the space of the day. And so for us, that was really the piece that we were trying to unlock. And it's something that was echoed in the sentiment of Arthur's piece, which is you're not actually trying to create a purely decentralized stablecoin because I don't actually think that they exist in reality. What you're trying to do is create a stablecoin, which is independent of the fiat system. And that's actually the quality that you're going for. So for us, yeah, like I said, it's a more narrow definition that we're going for. I don't think we've solved anything when it comes to the trilamor that's sort of presented as it is. But we are more narrowly defining what it is that we're trying to achieve. And in doing so, I hope that we're just presenting something that's honest to our users in terms of the type of trade -offs that we're making. Let's get into this in a sec. I think another one that's very common, like fear or concern in the stablecoin space, especially around Tether, is sort of this transparency angle. Is that kind of related to the censorship resistance for you or how do you think about that? Since I guess in Tether's case, many think, is the backing actually there, there's not enough audits? And yeah, is that something you're addressing as well? Yeah, 100%. So I think we felt like we weren't leveraging the openness and transparency of DeFi within our product. We'd be doing our users a massive disservice with the way that we put it together. So it does look slightly different here because we are leveraging centralized liquidity to put on the hedges. And we can jump into the reasons for that later on. But what you do have are wallets where you can see where the collateral is actually sitting. And then the corresponding hedges that offset that collateral, you can obviously just have a read from the exchange APIs to display that. So really what we're trying to do is elevate the local transparency here well beyond anything that you see, even from like a USDC where you're often waiting a month to get watered down or the reports come back. And here you can see a real -time dashboard of every single cent of collateral and hedge that sort of corresponds to that. And we think that showing that to our users and being fully transparent about it is the way that we really want to present the product to our users. Right. Yeah. Let's definitely get a bit more into this. I think maybe we take it back a bit around this actual principle of how the stable coin is created. So I guess in Athena it's called EUSD. And it mostly relies on this principle that you already said that you have the long asset, the core asset and a short position against it. Can you explain that maybe in a few sentences again for our listeners that maybe are not so familiar with financial products? Yeah, for sure. And maybe just before we jump into that, I know we've mentioned stable coins a few times on this. I think it's a word that we as a team have been thinking a bit more deeply around in terms of how we're marketing these type of products to people outside the space. So I just wanted to be clear before we jump to the mechanics that really the risks around this product look very different to having a normal stable coin with bonds basically sitting in a bank account in the real world. And so I think we're just thinking about repositioning the way that we describe the product as something that is closer to that synthetic dollar concept that I described earlier on. And yeah, really what goes into the synthetic dollar idea is you have, in Arthur's case, his idea was long BTC on one side and then short inverse perpetual on the other. And the basic idea there is that for every percentage change in the underlying collateral, those two positions are essentially netting off so that you always have one dollar of collateral that's in and out. One key change that we made to Arthur's post was thinking about swapping out Bitcoin for a stake Ethereum. There's a bunch of different reasons why we thought that that made sense. The main one being that you now have a positive carry to being long stake Ethereum. So you get paid some yield that's ranged between three and a half to six percent this year. And what that does is not only enable you to create what we think are really interesting yield products around the synthetic dollar, but then also it gives you a really interesting margin of safety because these hedges often do pay you to be short. So over the last three years, you get paid roughly seven percent to be short the ETH contract. But that's not always the case. And sometimes it is negative. So for periods during 2022, when the whole space was blowing up and centralized entities were getting liquidated, you did see that sort of briefly dip into into negative funding territory. And so having that stake return on one side obviously helps for you to be able to cover that risk as well and just create a more secure product. Right. So this funding rate, just to go into this a bit more, right, if you're shorting pay this funding rate to the other side, essentially. Right. And usually you get paid for putting on the short. So it's you can sort of think about it as there's a natural long demand for leverage within the system. And crypto is a long biased market where most people who are in the space think it's going up. And so they're willing to pay for that leverage to be longer than one X they're not worth. And so in our case, we're taking the opposite side of that position with a short and they're getting paid for that. But essentially the underlying to what if it's like negative or positive, the funding rate is essentially like a market dynamic of like supply and demand for short longs. Right. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned already. So they that mostly it's like long bias, I guess we'll maybe get into a bit more like how this could turn out in the future and things. But I guess one other question that I had around, you know, like you already said, you know, switching out Bitcoin for Ether, but is there also a potential to, you know, have multiple assets as collateral in a system like also Bitcoin maybe or even like other proof of stake assets? Yeah, absolutely. For us, it's really just a question of sequencing. So Bitcoin's obviously got the deepest derivative market sitting behind it, but it's obviously got that issue of not having as much interesting yield for you to be able to create a product. And so the way that we thought about this is in order to bootstrap something from zero and, you know, fund an insurance fund that can sit behind the whole thing and ultimately actually just drive demand for it, we know that people within crypto respond to yields. And that's how you can sort of address that cold start problem in the beginning by interesting people with something that has a bit more yield. But as we sort of grow in scale and you start to tap out the potential of derivative market and staked Ethereum, you can obviously generalize that to look at Bitcoin and then also other proof of stake assets like Solana. The issue here is that on one hand, Bitcoin's more scalable due to the size of the derivative market that exists around it, but you don't have the yield. But then on the other hand, you've got something like Solana, which, yes, it's got a proof of stake yield that's attached to it, but the derivative market is like a 20th of the size of Ethereum. So really, it is a question of sequencing for us. But who knows where these markets grow over the next three to five years. But we are sort of restricting ourselves to staked Ethereum, aren't they? Right. Yeah, makes sense. Makes no sense. I think what's also interesting, I guess, is this insurance one you just mentioned or like sinking fund, I think it's called in Arthur's post. So like that's basically for these periods where the funding rate goes negative. Can you like expand a bit? How does it exist in how are you building this? What like sort of, I guess, portion of the yield is diverted to that? How do you how are you thinking about the system to do that? Yeah, you can you can think about the sources and uses for the insurance fund in basically two ways. So the first is just raising capital. So when we're raising capital at the equity for the Ethereum Labs business or within the if we eventually have a token and do treasury sales through that, you obviously have an ability to basically raise dollar capital in exchange for the equity yield tokens. And I think that that's just a pretty clean and easy way to get to get an initial insurance fund set up. The other interesting piece about this is to the extent that you're generating yields on the product that are above market. So roughly this year, this product has been running at around 12 percent unlevered. And that's with crypto rates being pretty close to the low of their cycles versus like the real rates in the real world at 5 percent. What's interesting there, I think, is, yes, initially you want to pay out most of that yield, I think, to users in order to sort of bootstrap liquidity and supply in the beginning. But there does come a point where that interest rate differential to rates in the real world. I'm not convinced that you need to pay out the full amount to keep sort of users in the product. And so there might be an equilibrium where, you know, rates in the real world are at five, four, three. And this product's at 10, 12, 15. That obviously gives you some scope there to be able to capture some of that yield to the insurance fund going forward. I think the interesting piece about that is obviously, as I mentioned, funding is typically skewed positive where you get 7 percent over the last three years. And if you just look at the distribution of sort of the days of positive funding versus negative, when you include the stakeholder yields, you get 89 percent of the days you're getting paid and you can add cash to the insurance fund and only 11 percent where you're going to be drawing from it. So really, it is in your favor that you're going to be accumulating cash into the insurance fund through the life of the product. And we think it's quite interesting because you're capturing, you know, some value within the token, within the product and actually helping to create a more safe and secure product going forward by capitalizing the insurance fund. Right. Right. That makes sense. And then I guess if it turns negative, the insurance fund would like sort of subsidize that to get the yield back for a while. Is that sort of the mechanic that it would? Yeah. Well, what itself performs is zero in that case. So we don't want to be in a position like with what you saw with Anker and Luna, where I think actually creating that inflexible endogenous interest rate there, I think was one of the biggest mistakes that they made because you really need external market forces, I think, to be calibrating the supply of the whole system. And whenever you're stepping in and trying to pay more yield than it's naturally producing, I think it's just a bit of a slippery slope where it eventually leads to breakages in the system at some other point. And so really what the insurance fund is doing there is when it would be negative, you're just getting it to zero so that, you know, users aren't losing principle in the stablecoin. And then naturally what's going to happen is when you get paid zero percent to hold the stablecoin, we expect that some users would step out of the product. And in the process of doing so, we'd have to lift the shorts on the exchanges, which causes funding to mean Roberta going back above zero. So just to be totally clear on this one, the funding rate is not something that we're scared of. It really is like core to the whole design here, which is we want users to be responding to positive and negative interest rates. And when it does get too low, that means the supply of the stablecoin is too high relative to dynamics in the rest of the market and it needs to shrink. And we're not going to stand in the way of that. Right. I read this tweet where you answered basically some concerns of like each and Spartan there. And I found it very interesting that essentially the stablecoin can adjust by just people withdrawing and then you're closing out the shorts, like you just said. But there's also the just like general mechanics are not as many people might think, I think, in the that are like scarred from from Luna that it would be like totally collapsing at once or it's very, very hard to do that. Can you can you explain maybe why the like a deep hacking wouldn't be like, you know, from one dollar to zero versus instead maybe going like more gradually losing value in this sort of case? Yeah, for sure. So I think the the the key difference here is that you've actually got the collateral sitting behind the stablecoin. So Luna was obviously backed by basically just the faith that the Luna token had some sort of value and then market maker's ability to stand in and save the system a bit like a central backward in the real world. And the key difference here is, yes, even if you do have some of these issues and there are other risks outside of the negative funding, but we can just focus on this one, even if it does go negative, if you look at sort of the bottom twenty five centile of funding, are you like the worst quarter of where funding gets to, it's typically around sort of the negative five percent range. If you think about that on an annualized basis, if you're bringing that down to a daily attrition that you'd see within the stablecoin, it's literally one basis point per day. Right. So it's like not even comparable to a swap on curve or a little bit of slippage that you'd be paying like anywhere within this entire system. That's how much you're losing every day if this thing is at like the bottom quartile of the funding. And so really the risks are very different here where if something is going wrong, it's a very slow, gradual attrition of the principal of the stablecoin rather than something that sort of collapses to zero in the space of a day like you saw with Luna. Right. Totally. I think that's very interesting. I think maybe we can get a bit into like technically how it works. I think the interesting piece in Isina's case is I guess it has like the sort of interaction between CeFi and DeFi. So like there's there's elements on chain and there is like interaction with centralized parties. Can you just explain how that works and why you need that maybe? Yeah, for sure. So this is something that Arthur was pretty interesting on on his piece, which is the demand for this type of product we think is is here right now. And it's it's a product that sort of the need is immediate and urgent. And we don't really have the time to be able to wait for perpetual DEXs on chain to go to a size that would be able to accommodate for it. So centralized liquidity, rough numbers is between 25 to 30 times larger than what you see on chain. And part of the issue is that even on -chain DEXs, they're not a single unified source of liquidity. So you have Synthetix sitting on Optimism, you got GMX and Arbitrum, you got DYDX doing their app chain on Cosmos. These are all disparate areas and pools of liquidity, which you can't even sort of aggregate into one place to try and build this product. And so for us, it was really accepting the fact that you needed centralized liquidity in order to get this to scale, to achieve the goals that we have as a team and deliver a product that we think is useful for millions of people rather than thousands. And given that fact that you need to make those trade -offs, we ask ourselves the question of, can you do that in a trust -minimized way while you still retain the core pieces of decentralization that we care about? And so just going back to that original point that you're making around the trilemma, for us it was really asking a more narrow question of what is it that you actually care about when you have your assets on an exchange and what is it that you're trying to protect yourself from? And for us, it's really just you don't want your assets sitting on a centralized exchange. And so we've seen this over, if you have FTX 2 .0 out and again, where you want to be able to hold your assets and make sure that a centralized exchange is not going to basically withhold you being able to take them out. And so we've seen really interesting unlocks when it comes to custodian setups that have been put in place since FTX, where you have an ability now to hold your assets outside of the exchange, but then still use them as a marketing instrument for the derivative on the other side. And so what that unlocks is our ability to be able to, A, provide the transparency that I was describing earlier, so you can actually see those wallets and be able to read into them as a user on the other side. And we'll be providing that in dashboards on the app. And then B, it reduces that counterparty risk to the exchanges obviously enormously by being able to disaggregate the assets from sitting on that service.
Evangelism on SermonAudio
A highlight from Encouragement from Paul's Evangalistic Example & Teaching
"Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for Grant and artists and others like them there in Israel serving you, getting the message of the gospel out, and we thank you for looking after them, protecting them, preserving them thus far, and we thank you for helping us to understand some of the struggles that they're currently facing. We do pray for the Christians there in Jerusalem that they might understand that unity in Christ is a remarkable thing. Purchased by the blood of Christ, accomplished by the gospel, and such a powerful evidence of the gospel is that natural enemies could become brothers and sisters, one family of God, and that we pray that that wonderful power of the gospel might be on display in a wonderful way. We continue to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and your hand upon all your people. We ask that you might also bless our time of Bible study now. Help us, Lord, to learn how we might better reach people for the gospel, people that we speak to. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. All right now. My first visit to India was in 1997. My task was to teach in Bible college and in some church churches and also to preach at some outdoor evangelistic meetings, and I'd never preached to a group of unsaved Hindus before, and I was quite daunted at the prospect. I wasn't sure what approach to take. I said to Jesus, I said, what do I do? Do I try to prove that Christianity is a superior belief system to Hinduism? Do I try to prove there's only one true God? Should I try to convince them that the Bible is the authoritative inspired word of God? I wasn't sure what approach to take. Do I try to prove the divine nature of the Bible, and therefore it has the authority and we should listen to it rather than anything else? What the Bible says about God and man and salvation, that's what's to be believed. Do we try to man a case to prove the inspiration of the scriptures or the deity of Christ? How do you present the gospel to people who are not monotheists? How do you present the gospel to people who believe in thousands of gods and don't accept the Bible as authoritative? How do you share the gospel with people whose worldview is so completely different to a Christian worldview? I was surprised by Nye's response. He said, brother, just preach the gospel. He didn't intend it as a rebuke, but it was to me. His answer was very instructive and it was also very reassuring. And it does raise some questions. How much does an unsaved person understand about the existence of God? To what extent is he aware already of his sinfulness and his need for forgiveness? Is it necessary to begin every evangelistic message or conversation with an attempt to prove by rational argument that God exists and that the Bible is true? Must we find a way of intellectually convincing people that they don't measure up to God's standards and that one day they'll have to give an account to him? Or can we assume that all people have some awareness of God and that they are indeed already conscious of their sinful condition? Is the knowledge of God and the knowledge of sin intuitive? If so, to what degree? How do we go about sharing the gospel with someone who has no Christian understanding whatsoever? Now as we continue to consider the evangelistic example of Paul, we know that if a city he was entering into had a Jewish synagogue, he would go there first, open the Old Testament scriptures and preach the gospel. But we also know that Paul was specifically appointed to be an apostle to the Gentiles, idol -worshipping Gentiles who believed in many gods, who were highly immoral and had no regard for scripture whatsoever. Their beliefs and their behavior, their whole worldview was totally pagan and it's very instructive to us to see how Paul evangelized such people. Let's take our Bibles please and open to Acts chapter 24. Acts chapter 24 is where we read about Paul's encounter with Felix and Drusilla. And what we find is that Paul assumes that they already knew some basic truths or else Paul's convinced that they would intuitively recognize the truth about what he was saying about God and sin and salvation. Felix was a Gentile, he was an utterly corrupt man. He was the Roman governor of Judea, his wife Drusilla was the daughter of King Herod I, Herod Agrippa I, she came from a very wicked family. Felix himself was steeped in Roman paganism, he had a terrible reputation for greed and cruelty, he had stolen Drusilla from her first husband and both of them were ungodly and in keeping with their pagan worldview. And yet Paul spoke to them on the basis that they could easily understand their obligations to God. Now we need to note that Paul did have a previous conversation with Felix where he explained to him the difference between Jews and Christians. Jews are those who merely pay lip service to God whereas Christians are those who really believe in the inspiration of the scriptures and its message, that's the difference. That had that conversation before and yet in spite of that previous conversation Felix was still a pagan man with pagan understanding and therefore we might think that in presenting the gospel of Felix Paul needed to have a series of conversations with Felix where he would teach Felix that it was wrong for him to believe in the Roman concept of a multiplicity of gods and teach him through systematic teaching that there's only one true God. You might also wonder how Paul would explain to Felix that this one true God is holy and he Felix is sinful, bearing in mind that Felix's sensuality was not only acceptable in Roman society it was actually seen as a virtue and also that such behavior was totally acceptable with the Roman gods. Therefore we might think that Paul would have a hard time raising the issue with Felix about a future day of judgment for his life. So what approach did Paul take to evangelize this corrupt ungodly man lost in the darkness of pagan ideas, idol worshipping, believing the multiplicity of gods, worshipping emperors? Did Paul think it was needful to establish an intellectual reasonableness of the Christian faith? It's fascinating to see that Paul went straight to the point started talking about gospel matters. Verse 24, Acts 24 verse 24, now after certain days when Felix came with his wife Trusilla which was a Jewess he sent for Paul and heard him concerning the faith in Christ and as he reasoned of righteousness and temperance and judgment to come Felix trembled and answered go thy way for this time when I have a convenient season I will call for thee. So the word reason means to lay out a matter, to thoroughly present a matter. What issues did Paul lay out before Felix? The issues of righteousness and temperance, self -control and judgment to come. In other words, Paul gave an extremely direct and challenging address, he proceeded on the assumption that as he laid out these three simple points Felix would have no problem understanding what Paul was saying and Paul also was confident no doubt that Felix's conscience would aroused be by these points. Now we need to say that as far as we know Felix never did become a Christian and yet as far as a faithful gospel witness is concerned, Paul was confident that Felix was able to understand these issues. He was confident that Felix knew these things were true and he was confident that Felix's conscience would be troubled about these things and so Paul reasoned of righteousness he presented God as righteous and God as requiring righteousness and the fact that Felix himself was not righteous especially in one area which Paul laid out to Felix, he spoke about temperance, self -control which is something that Felix certainly did not have. Felix was greedy, he was a violent man, if he wanted anything he would stop at nothing to get whatever he wanted, he would eliminate whatever, whoever was in his way. He's the man in the grip of his central impulsive heart and so Paul focused on that thing where he was most vulnerable and sensitive. Then Paul spoke about judgment to come, a day of future judgment where Felix and everyone else will give an account to God for their lives. You notice that Paul didn't attempt to present an extended apologetic argument for monotheism, he didn't spend time proving or disproving the error of polytheism, he didn't attack the Roman gods, he just ignored them for the non -entities that they are. Paul's emphasis is recorded at the end of verse 24, when Felix heard out of words out of Paul's mouth, these words out of Paul's mouth, what he heard was concerning faith in Christ, that's what he heard from Paul. God is righteous, Felix is a sinner, there's a day of judgment coming where Felix will have to give an account, he's a man in desperate need of forgiveness and the only way to receive that is through faith in Christ, very direct, very effective. Notice in the middle of verse 25 that Felix trembled, despite the fact that Felix's lifestyle was completely consistent with his religious beliefs, Paul's presentation went straight to his heart. Simple gospel challenge didn't just bounce off his heart as we might expect, it penetrated Felix's heart, caused him to fear things that previously didn't trouble him, this simple straightforward challenge had a profound effect upon him. Now there are things here in Paul's approach which are very instructive for us and would serve us, will serve us well in our day and age, we live in a society which is rapidly returning to the paganism and the immorality of the first century Greco -Roman world, we live in a society where people are giving up belief in one true God, we live in a society where people no longer believe that sinful deeds are actually sinful and so they tell us you know why is this message even necessary, how is it even relevant, therefore we might conclude that our best approach with such people is to try to prove them intellectually that God does exist and to prove them rationally that sin is real and is a problem and yet here we see that Paul simply declared the truth about God, simply declared the fact of sin, simply declared the certainty of coming judgement and declared just as directly and as simply that faith in Christ is the solution, gospel is the remedy and he said these things on the assumption that even a pagan mind had the capacity to understand what he was saying regardless of whether or whether not he'd heard these things before, in other words if we think that every point of the gospel must be rationally proved before it can have an effect upon unbeliever then we're wrong, from Paul's example we learn that the simple presentation of the gospel message has a unique connecting power because when we declare the biblical message every human being instinctively realises to some extent the truthfulness of this message and is challenged by it, now it may be that people are resistant to the message, people resent the message, people oppose it or give no hint of being affected by it but according to the scripture as we shall see when we do speak directly to them about righteousness and about sin and about judgement and the need for forgiveness there is something deep inside every single person that says yes I know this message is true, my heart says this message is true, how do we know this? Well for one we see it in Paul's method but is the directness of Paul's method confirmed by his teaching? Does the Word of God give us any assurance that a straightforward gospel approach will have a real impact upon the inner sensitivities of present -day hearers? Well the answer is yes. In Romans chapter one and two Paul shows us very clearly that several aspect of our evangelistic message will be plain and evident to all people partly because they made obvious by the natural world around them and partly because they are indelibly impressed upon each person's awareness. From that which God has created around us and that which God has placed within us it is evident to everyone that there is a God who is invisible and powerful and holy and that everyone is a sinner before him destined for judgment and them to them. They will carry a powerful ring of truth because there is something within them to testify. Yes this is true. Now it is true that some aspect of gospel message are not evident from nature nor are they written within men's hearts for example the way of salvation, the atoning death of Christ, his glorious resurrection, how it is that we can be born again and how it is that we can have righteousness imputed to us. Such truths are revealed only in the gospel message itself however there is great encouragement for us to realize that the knowledge of God and sin and judgment are already latent within every person no matter what class or culture they influence they may be by false religious ideas. Awareness of sin and guilt may be suppressed from someone's conscious knowledge but it's always there in the soul lying just beneath the surface so that the preacher or the witnessing Christian might by speaking about these things stir up of their knowledge these things. Paul makes his point very clear in Romans 1 verses 18 and 19. Oops I better turn there. Romans 1 let's go to Romans 1 verse 18. Romans 1 18 for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness because that which may be known of God is manifest in them for God has showed it unto them the word hold there who hold the truth in unrighteousness the word hold means to hold down or to suppress and what it's saying is that there are many things about God which people do instinctively know and understand because they are evident in the natural world they're obvious from the natural world and they are also affirmed by our conscience within. We don't have to regard unregent people as totally unreachable or totally unteachable as though as though they were creatures from another planet. God has made them inwardly aware of his existence and surrounded has them with the all -pervasive evidence of nature. What do people know from creation? What is obvious from the natural world? That's the word that's missing there. What isn't obvious from the natural world? Verse 20 Paul says for the invisible things of him invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made even his eternal power and Godhead so that they that is all men are without excuse.
Game of Crimes
A highlight from 119: Part 1: Ed Calderon Fights Cartels, Corruption, and Crime in Tijuana, Mexico
"It's been a recurring thing that I hear like, oh, the DEA arrested him. No, we didn't say that. The guys we talked to made it very clear it was the Mexican Marines who went in, you know, they were working with them, but you're saying it was two federal police officers? He carjacked us. No, I mean, eventually, but I'm talking about the operation. I know what you're getting at, the actual arrest. The actual arrest was done by two federal roadside cops. He's in a dirty white, he's in a dirty t -shirt, you know. Yeah, he went through a sewer because he had some of the most advanced escape safe houses that anybody's ever seen in Mexico. At least on that end, he was the top of the game. And I say this because it seems to me that a lot of effort was put into the narrative of this operation, you know, and it was boggling the mind to some of us that have been in that field for years to try Why all that effort over some specific guy? You know, because if you designate somebody as a big figurehead and then you get that figurehead, you claim victory, you go, hey, we've done something about it, as opposed to have you really. I mean, is it about the stat or is it about the actual impact? And I know, Murph, we've had these discussions before. Well, even, and so the reason I was in Mexico City on those original meetings is as I was working out of our special operations division and I was running the Mexico Central America section. And I can't get into a lot of detail on some of this because it's, some of it's still classified and some of it you just don't want people to know capabilities. But there was a lot of discussion about that guy, about Chapo, and there were assets in place that could monitor certain things. The execution part was the problem. And this was back in, what do you say, 2003? I was there from 01 to 06, so this was 03 or 04. And my suggestion to everybody was let's bring in our special operators, just like we did in Columbia against Pablo. The problem is, once we got, we had Dev Groom, we had Delta down there with us, but then their general said, well, you can only be in the base, you can't go out in the field. Special mission unit Delta, Delta Force doesn't exist. Not the best frickin' operators in the world were confined to base. I mean, these guys are the frickin' studs of the world. But here was the difference. The Colombians invited us down there, the Mexicans won't. Mexico has a very, and I'm Mexican by birth, and I'm making my way into being a citizen in the U .S. Mexico in general has a very difficult relationship with the United States foreign policy, and it's historically been pretty bad on the Mexican end. So inviting the U .S. military to operate in Mexico is political suicide in every single way, shape, or form you can have in Mexico. If you do that, you're dead politically, and the army knows this. You go all the way back to Pancho Villa and the Alamo, and this is not something that just happened yesterday. Yeah, but I've heard rumors of very tall people wearing federal police uniforms that didn't know how to respond in Spanish. I was around for some of those weird fuckin' events. The main issue, I think, is that Mexico is realistically free -for -all and lawless. If the United States really wanted to stop the fentanyl flow through its borders, it would probably have to set up some sort of military or naval blockade on the Pacific and the Atlantic side. I've floated this idea of actually discussing this with the guy at DOD this morning, talking about the legalities of it. You almost get to the point where you have to declare a demilitarized zone. You have to say three miles either side of this is open for military action. To your point, you've got to blockade everything from the border to the water to the airspace. We're almost back into a Tom Clancy, clear and present danger thing, where you have to declare, until they declare the cartels a terrorist organization or something that gives them an official designation to go after them. To your point, it's a political issue and it's not been handled well. The whole terrorist designation thing, it's interesting. They're in politicized every way. That's why Mexico has one of the most... They assassinate a lot of political candidates in Mexico. I think it's one of the places where it's one of the most dangerous places to be one in the world. They also go after the press a lot because members of the press report on one side or the other. They're very much politicized and they're very much in the political sphere. They hang people from bridges and the amounts of the ISIS execution videos that you would see back in the day were all realistically inspired by the Mexican ones. The cartels they were doing this year, this wasn't anything new to them, beheading people. We got so upset, and we should have, when ISIS beheaded a couple of captors. But then there'd be 10 people you'd find buried in a mass grave all had their heads taken off and it was like just another day in news reporting. The ones that really pioneered the whole projecting horrible events aspect of it was Mexico. The cartels were posting some of these execution videos before ISIS. It's been interesting to see them basically express every single element that you would consider for a terrorist organization. It's a transnational group engaging in violence for a political end. They affect elections, they affect spending, they affect... I don't know why we haven't designated them that, but then the question is even if we did, what would change? I think I know one of the reasons why that hasn't happened, and it's a political and immigration reason. As soon as you declare all these organizations a terrorist organization, everybody coming over that border, fleeing from the violence, now has a legal claim to asylum. And that is a big issue. I think that is at the core of things. It's not like it's stopping anything at this point either. I mean, it's when you look at what's coming across, it's like everybody's claiming asylum anyway. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard issue. It's a complex one. Something has to be done, and if it isn't done, something's going to be forced upon the United States to react, and I think that's where we're headed. Five years ago, I said in five years, not two years ago, I said in five years, we're going to see some sort of military intervention by the U .S. and Mexico. And with everything that's going on, I think I'm pretty well on my way to kind of be right about that. Members of Congress have talked about that. It's a bipartisan thing, so something's coming. We're heading into elections now in Mexico. And what do you think about the woman candidate? Do you think she's got a shot? There seems to be absolutely nobody in the political realm that has any sort of name behind them. I think she's going to be a sure win for these coming elections. guy The other that was running, Evrat, who was basically taken out, he had some interesting ideas about the state of security in Mexico. And I think some of these are going to be rehashed by this political candidate. He had something called the Plan Anquil for Mexico, which is basically an AI -ran, Chinese state -provided security plan that involves social credit. Social credit, here we go again. Yeah, it's social credit and surveillance and drones and you name it, basically. And he showcases video of the people that were involved in the creation of this. There's a big segment of that on the Chinese president showing up in that video. I think that's where we're headed. There's open hostility and there's an open political hostility between Mexico and the United States now. There's a lot of tension going on and China's being invited in. And you can see that in different letters of the politics in Mexico and anti -Americanism in Mexico is at an all -time high. So it's a perfect storm. Let's rewind a little bit because I want to talk a little bit more about your time on the police force now and on this experimental group. What were some of the things that you got involved in that you started... At some point you felt like you could make a difference, right? So what were the things that you were doing that you thought, hey, man, I really can make a difference. I really can impact things. What kind of operations or things were you guys doing? We would basically get information from basically a national platform of information that just got started through leadership. And our leadership was basically the military members that were working in a civilian capacity at this point, like Lezola. Since they were members of the military and they were high ranking officers, they had access to information that none of us could ever have access to. So there was a clear line of communication from the top all the way to the bottom. And we had people that we can trust, that we can work with. And we had actual secrecy within the groups once we were settled. So we'd basically be going out every night, figuring some of these target packages out. From growth sites to laboratories to people who were running some of the most sophisticated abduction and ransom operations the world had ever seen back then. To just figuring out where things were coming from and where they were going to. A lot of that work was done in cooperation with the United States. I got to work on a lot of stuff with our liaison unit. So it was basically, you could see the pace of it as soon as Lezola got involved in actually being the director of us. And getting everything lined up so we could operate, it was clear. It was work being done, it was fear being felt on the other side of the table, the people we were fighting. Our weapons changed. Before we were on, it was unheard of to see a police officer carrying around a fully automatic rifle. Or a grenade launcher for that fact. Slowly but surely he started arming us and preparing us for a war. He very much treated it as a war, or as a counter -insurgency is what he would say. He would, instead of sending us out in small groups, he would send us out in big groups and we would operate in different parts of the city during the night and we would move around. So it was an unknown where we were going to be or what was going to happen. We didn't even know where we were going to be sometimes. Some nights we would just be moved around randomly. What was your area of responsibility? Just Tijuana or the state? All of Baja. I worked outside of Baja a few times on loan, but mostly all of Baja. And Mexico, if I remember, is structured, is it 38 states or 37 states? 37 states, I think. So you've got state police forces, right? Then you've got a federal police force. So back then the federal police was basically army guys dressed in grey and they would ride in the back of our trucks. That was the federal police back then when it first got started. It eventually professionalized and they were trying to figure out, so they were trying to catch up with what we were doing basically. But back then the federal police was army guys dressed in grey in the back of the truck. So there's federal police, state police, and local municipal police. The municipal police historically and all over the country has been the issue. Because it's local police that live there, that have their families living there, and obviously it's a very easy target to go after. And since there's a lot of them, you know, it's hard to move anything in a city without them knowing. So that's who the cartels basically didn't get involved with directly. And I think you mentioned it in an interview you did, it basically boils down to right, plateau or plomo, right? These guys are living there. Yeah, Lezola had a very interesting approach to cleaning up some of those municipal institutions. He basically took, when Tijuana was very corrupt, back then it still is now, but there was a time when he cleaned it up for a bit. He would go into the police precincts and say, hey, who's in charge? This guy. Oh, cool. Obviously he's in leagues with one of the two cartels that are fighting over Tijuana. So he would send him, move him to the precinct that was being ran by the other cartel. They would switch him. So they would immediately quit and then he would put his people in, you know? It was basically the best confident exam ever. Immediately most of these people would quit the next day. This sounds like Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics, you know, you switch things up. That's an issue in Mexico. I mean, some of this corruption just goes deep and is blood related. It's historic and it's very fractured. Even within a single city, you'll see one side of the city is involved with one group and the other side is involved with the other. So politics are always, it's a game of thrones almost, a level thing. But he did a lot of, we were working daily to get things back to a sense of normal or a sense of safety. When we were, when I got started, these cartel groups would broad daylight run around the city in convoys with AKs out the window, this Tijuana. And by the time we were probably five or six years in, that didn't happen anymore. They were hiding now. So things were changing. So we did feel that things were changing. How did you make it change? I mean, what did you do to make it? Because obviously at some point there's got to be, I mean, violence is inherent in things that happen like this. But how did you, from an operational standpoint, you talk about even like an insurgency. Do you get the public to work with you on this or is this just simply your tactics and your own resources? I think the municipal police was key. Lieutenant Colonel Isaulabe specifically went after cleaning up, professionalizing and sorting out the municipal police locally and using us as a brace to hold things while that was happening. And the municipal police was disarmed for a few weeks at some point. All of the municipal police in Tijuana, their guns were taken. So all of us were basically used and the military were used as an auxiliary police force in Tijuana. I remember going out on a few responding calls and that's probably the bulk of my real community policing experience was when I was basically replacing the municipal police. So he went at things systematically and I think he was allowed to do a lot at different layers of the government, which is why he was so successful. Since he came from the federal branch of the military, he was involved directly in basically institutionalizing a professional police force at a state level with us. And then he was put in charge of the municipal police in Tijuana. So he attacked it from three layers and from three sides. And I think that's what led to his success cleaning up the city, at least for the time it was, because it's pretty much back to square one right now. Was that during the Arellano Felix days? It was at the tail end of them. Something happened to the Arellano Felix cartel, probably related to most of their members being arrested or killed. There was a fracture there. A few of their top level lieutenants basically switched sides to the Sinaloa cartel. Among them, a guy named, they used to call him the three letters El Teo. He basically formed a hyper violent Sinaloa cartel cell in Tijuana and then went to war with the remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel. That's the bulk of the violence that I saw during the time that it was initially active down there. You would see 12 people show up dead one night. You would see shootouts in the middle of the day in different parts of the city. You would see the military basically show up and be involved in some of these shootouts as well. So it was very much an urban warfare setting. With a lot of the things I saw, I think when we would go to foreign training and learn from other people, I think I remember having this moment where we were being shown some of the IRA violence that happened back in the day in Ireland. How they were fighting the military, the English basically. That very much reminded me of some of the stuff that was happening in Baja at that time. I was going to say, we had two of my friends on from New Scotland Yard, the Counterterrorism Command, and one of them was working back in the day when it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the troubles in Northern Ireland and some of the tactics they did. He was there. He actually responded when they blew up Lord Mountbatten and the boat that he was on. We always wondered how much cross -pollination, was there any cross -pollination between the provisional IRA and some of those folks that are ending up in Mexico to teach them techniques to resist? Bomb making in Mexico comes directly from the IRA. There's no question about it. IRA people were arrested and detained in Colombia training the FARC members. Some of those same techniques and tactics have shown up in bomb testing fields in Guadalajara and Jalisco, for example. Those homemade mortar devices, mining explosives being utilized to arm civilian drones and to disperse very poisonous chemical pesticides as part of the payload. A lot of these actually do stem from some IRA influence, so there's definitely an influence there as far as the explosives that have been found all over Mexico. We've been experiencing this renaissance of explosives all over Mexico recently. Roadside IEDs are now a thing, and the military is actually learning and preparing for them now. It's something that hadn't happened realistically. We've had car bombs before, but roadside IEDs are now being utilized in places like Michoacán, for example. Murph, when you and Javier were down there going after Pablo, how many bombs a day were going off at the peak? It wasn't unusual to have 10 or 15 per day. There was one evening when we'd been out on ops all day, we came back, we were at the base in Medellín. That night we heard 17 different bombs go off. Wow. In Mexico, there's places where these bombs are being utilized, specifically drone ones. We don't have a lot of ordnance laying around all over the place, but we do have a shit ton of mining explosives that are all over the place. Do you see them using the ammonium nitrate to blow things up also? Every now and then, specifically what they utilize is a thing called Cemex, which is basically mining -level plastic explosives. Those loads are usually made with that. It's controlled and restricted, but it's Mexico. You can't have a gun unless you're poor. If you're poor, you can't have a gun, but if you have money, you can get whatever you want here. Let's talk a little bit more, because this leads into a discussion about, you're on for a long time, but you kind of crossed, as they say, the Rubicon. There becomes a point to where you realize, hey, what I'm doing isn't making a difference anymore. There are some changes in the government, changes in the unit. What starts happening where you start seeing going, yeah, this is not something I think I can do for the next 20 years. I've got to start thinking of an exit strategy. When does that kind of thinking start happening for you? I mean, it lays all the leaves, and it leaves under very bad terms, basically. Bad terms with who? With the government. He's basically pushed out by people who think he's doing too well of a job. Two of our guys get brutally killed, and one of them came out of the academy with me. I knew his family. Great guy. What's his name? Arenas. All right. We salute him. We dedicate this to your buddy. Absolutely. He was a lawyer. He had no reason to go into the police force. He just wanted to make a difference, and he had a giant heart. He was picked up outside of the hotel we were staying at by some dudes dressed in federal police uniforms who were not federal police. And while we were all being basically concentrated in the city to find these people, he was told to step down. That was the first major blow. Was he getting too close to something or just being too effective? I think he was being too effective. He was being too effective and too broad in his approach is what I think probably happened. He was basically going after everybody, and that is not something you could do for a long period in Mexico, apparently. Did he eventually suffer an injury? He over had nine assassination attempts on his life. They tried to poison him with the fruit juice that they would put in his fridge in the office. A military convoy was cloned. They found Hummers painted exactly like the military, and they were going to ambush him in some part of the city. A friend of mine was involved in the security, and he did some legendary shit to get him out of that. Eventually, when he was the police chief of Juarez, when he was leaving that job, he got shot in the back by somebody. That cost him the use of his legs. He's in a wheelchair now. He's still smart as hell, and I'm still afraid of him as a man, but when he left, it basically gutted us. He created a very velocos, forward -driven, militarized police force with a lot of dudes running around with machine guns just ready to respond to shit. All of a sudden, we were neutered. We were told to quiet down. We were told to be less overt. We were told to go back to community policing. We were told to stand down, basically. Things started slowly changing. Politically, this to -the -right presidency left office and was replaced by a central leftist presidency that was more of the old guard of politics in Mexico, the PRI as its own. The PRI, right. They had ruled for a long time. They lost the first election, I think. Wasn't it after Vicente Fox? Didn't he lose? In the PRI, that was their last. Vicente Fox and Calderón got back to the PRI with Pena Nieto. When he came in, a lot of stuff happened. It's the amnesia effect, is what I call it. Every presidential cycle ends, and anything that worked, if it worked because it was because of the other party, fuck that. It's gone. Gee, that sounds familiar. It certainly does. It's not unique to Mexico, pal. I think what's unique to Mexico is that they will throw out everybody. I mean, it doesn't matter if you have, there's no job security. Imagine this. Every five years, you would fire everybody from the FBI and rehire everybody new. This is the level of retardation that I'm talking about. You had these institutions that were built up over the span of two presidential cycles, like the one that I belong to. They were doing the job, they were getting good at it in a lot of ways, and then a lot of the people that were fired because of the polygraph exams being failed sued the government and were hired back because that's not illegal grounds to fire anybody, even though they were on the take. You would see people that hadn't been on the force in six years, seven years, just all of a sudden just show back off the office, people that you clearly knew that were working on the other side or back. And some of these guys you had actually arrested, right? Some of them were arrested by the unit that I was in, yeah, and they were back. That's got to be a weird feeling is that you realize you were in handcuffs, you were kicked off, you were charged, and now you're back. I mean, you talk about trust issues, I mean, inherently. They were laughing in the office. The cars that were in the parking lot, I didn't earn an absurd amount of money and I basically drove the same car driving into that job as the one that left that job just for discretion purposes. But some of the absurdity you would see in those parking lots after these changes were made, it was pretty fascinating. The overt nature of the corruption was like, oh, yeah, we're not going to hide anymore. Let's just take my Hummer H2 to work. In the meantime, go check us out. Also, patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. It's where we put a lot more content you won't hear on our regular podcast. We go into a lot more topics and folks, it is a lot of fun. So go check us out. Patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. In the meantime, everybody stay safe. We'll see you tomorrow for part two.
Epicenter
A highlight from Niklas Kunkel: Chronicle Ethereum's First-Ever Oracle
"Welcome to Epicentre, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian. I'm here with Felix. Today, we're speaking with Nicolas Kunkel. He's the founder of Chronicle. Chronicle is an Oracle protocol providing data for blockchain applications, and it's also a spin -out of the Maker protocol. So Nicolas and his team were basically heading the Oracle team at Maker, and that team has now spun out to form Chronicle as a standalone product. So we'll be diving into Chronicle today, understanding how it works, and also talking about the Oracle market more broadly. Nicolas, thanks for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. So you've been in the space for some time. Obviously, you were part of the Maker team and heading the Oracle team there. How did you get involved with Ethereum, and how did you start working with the Maker team? Actually quite funny. I was at IBM in the research department, and we were actually working on Hyperledger, which was this permissioned ledger. And then the - Future of blockchains. Yeah. Yeah. It was the future. Effectively, IBM had missed the boat on cloud completely. They were very upset, and they said, the next thing that comes along, we're going big and we're going early. And to their credit, they were very, very early on blockchain. They just got the public -private ledger equation wrong. And so the Ethereum whitepaper came out, and I read this and I was like, oh, wait, public general compute layer. That's the thing. I go to my boss, I'm like, all right, we should just throw away everything we did. We should just use this Ethereum stuff. And they're like, no, that's just vaporware. I think somewhere, I think a year later, Mainnet actually launches, and we're like, look, it's real. Let's go. And I was quickly told, shut up, get in line. So I made my way over to the Ethereum community, and while the community was great, there were not actually that many real, let's say, protocols to work and contribute to. There was a lot of hobbyist stuff going on with grand ideals, but not a lot of people just working full -time on building something. I think back then, the three big teams were Augur, DigixDAO, and Maker. And so out of those, I chose Maker because it just seemed like a circle of these individuals where I felt like the dumbest person in the room, and that always seemed like a very productive environment for learning. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think also interesting to hear these three teams, essentially all DeFi applications, if you want to say it like that, DigixDAO was about tokenizing gold. So kind of interesting that the early teams were already working on what became the biggest use case. Sure. I mean, if you think about what DigixDAO was, I think it was just a matter of wrong timing today, like a DigixDAO would be an RWA, a token that is like a stable coin backed by a gram of physical gold in the real world, like that's a real world asset. You've brought gold onto the blockchain, that would be huge in the RWA narrative right now. So also like of these three, I guess, like you said, the timing was wrong there, maybe, and also like Augur, sort of the projection market thing didn't turn out like that well, let's say, or it's still like sort of, it's kind of still around, I guess, more so than with PolyMarket maybe, but also, I guess, yeah, Maker definitely is the most successful out of the three, maybe because of you also, but yeah, or maybe can you tell us a little bit about what, about the early days at Maker and sort of, yeah, what was so special about it? Yeah, I mean, in the early days of Maker, like there was nothing, right? There were no DEXs, like this was way before an Ether Delta or anything. So we were like, well, we want to make DAI, but in order to make DAI, we have to build all this other stuff first, right? So we made the first DEX. There were no Oracles, so, you know, conceptually they existed, but no one had actually made like an Oracle protocol that anyone could use, no one was planning to make one. So we made the first Oracle, we deployed that in, I want to say June of 2017, in conjunction with like the prototype for Psi, I think it was called Proto Psi. And you know, that protocol, I mean, one was like the first Oracles on Ethereum, but two, if you think about how long that was running, I mean, it's been running consistently since then, right? And like six years at this point on Ethereum, I mean, that makes it one of like the oldest kind of almost like a grandfather -like protocol, if you will. So we're quite proud to have built something that really lasted and like withstood the test of time. What were the early visions for Maker and what were they trying to achieve at the time and contrast that with what Maker has become now, like how different has that vision played out? Sure. So I think with any kind of startup with a grand vision, you always have to make kind of adjustments over time, right? Like you have to imagine, right? When the idea for Maker was conceived, when the Maker white paper came out, there was no DeFi. The thing that I give like, you know, Runa and Nikolai, the two co -founders of Maker out so much credit for, is that to them, it wasn't like a possibility that this like vibrant DeFi ecosystem would exist, right? It was a certainty. And they were building, you know, for this like puzzle piece in that certain future that they envisioned, right? And you know, I think founders always have kind of visions of the future, but like, you know, Runa and Nikolai were really acute and really kind of got it right. But even, you know, within that, right? You can say, okay, well, in the future, there's this vibrant DeFi ecosystem. There's going to need to be some way to transact value that is stable, right? Because people don't want to transact in something that's volatile, right? Like if you're a merchant, you don't want to accept something that's volatile, right? You have thin margins. If you don't get paid in something stable, your margins blow up, right? And you don't have a sustainable business, right? As a customer, you don't want to hold anything volatile, right? Because you don't want to see your wallet like a value, like fluctuate, right? You want to have like a stable purchasing power. So I think the need for a stable coin was quite clear from a theoretical perspective. But I think there were kind of this idea that the consumer side of using crypto, right? Like in their everyday lives, right? For spending and for earning, that that would kind of keep in pace with the more, let's say financial infrastructure, right? And I think as we've seen the past couple of years, while there has been consumer adoption of crypto, DeFi has just like outscaled that type of adoption massively. Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think that the role of Maker in early DeFi, I think a lot of people who maybe are using DeFi now, it's sort of like, you know, I don't want to say it's forgotten, but like because stable coins are such an important part of DeFi and obviously USDC has taken up the larger part of the market, I think it's worth remembering that in the beginning, when we didn't have USDC, like we had DAI and DAI was the only real way to get out of risk assets in early DeFi and played like a tremendously important role. So I think it's like a very important public good and also something that allowed DeFi to basically be spawned into existence. I kind of think like the inflection point, what really hit for me was that you know, back in 2017, right, when we released SAI, the moment after we released it, Maker internally started paying everybody in SAI and it wasn't like planned that way beforehand, it was just kind of like, well, like, you know, if we actually built what we said we built, you know, if we actually like believe that like it works, like you wouldn't mind being paid in it. Right. And I remember Andy, Andy Millenius, who was the CTO at the time just being like, okay, we're going to start paying everybody inside, everyone's kind of like shrug, okay. And that's really cool, right? That's when you go from like theoretical product, you know, with like, oh, it's going to be used in the future for all of this stuff to like, no, you're like using it yourself, right? You have so much confidence in this thing you built, right, that you're willing to, you know, kind of like stake your livelihood on it. And you know, that continues today. Like even at Chronicle, like we still pay our team and DAI, even at Maker, our teams are still paid in DAI, like it's, you know, there's a lot of teams across crypto, right, that get paid in DAI or are willing to accept payment in DAI, you know, we work with auditors more like, can we pay you in DAI and they're like, yeah, no problem, right? So it's really beautiful that there's like, really the generalized economy built around the whole thing. I think, yeah, it's really cool, it's also like something that you see in the Maker community in general, I guess, where we were noticing that it's often seen as like one of these most like decentralized or like pushing for decentralization in a lot of ways, I guess DAI being like the most decentralized stablecoin, arguably maybe to this day, and that being used there is also a sign of that, but maybe you can also like expand, you know, how else this is like taking shape in like sort of the spirit of people working on Maker and how it led you essentially to, I guess, also like now become Chronicle and your own spin out from Maker. Sure. I mean, so from the beginning in Maker, there was always this focus on quality, on doing something right, you know, and you can, I think there's like this trade -off right in the development space where, you know, you can do something fast, you can do something cheap or you can do something with very high quality, right, and like choose to. And I think Maker was very much always maxing out on, you know, doing something at a very high quality, right, regardless of how much time it took, right. And I think we got a lot of pushback at the time, right, for being very slow to release things, but I think our vision was always, you know, that DeFi would scale to the billions, the tens of billions, to the hundreds of billions. And so, you know, when we were thinking about like the financial mechanisms and backing for DAI, right, that was always the standard to what we were building to. And I think that was very prescient. So I think like that ethos, you know, at this point, we've kind of had like generations of like core developers at Maker, right, there's just been like several different kind of waves of people. But I think that attitude towards this, like we kind of like to call it like Maker grade, I think that attitude towards doing something right, you know, that kind of has really prevailed. Especially when you see like all of the ex -developers of MakerDAO, right, branching off, you know, to start their own projects, right. You know, you see it with the Ashna guys, you see it with the SummerFi guys, right, you see it with Sense, you know, I think that prevailing attitude of kind of like Maker grade has really like pollinated to those projects as well. And Chronicle is definitely among, counts that among like one of our values internally as well. Let's talk about Chronicle more specifically. Why did you guys choose to spin out the Oracle from Maker as a different product? And we were talking about this before the show, Felix and I, and I think this isn't the first, like I feel like Python also spun out of some project. I know that in Cosmos, like there's this UMI protocol, which is lending protocol. They're spinning out their Oracle as well as a product. Is this a trend or is there like an Oracle spin out trend happening here? Well, so in terms of our journey out of Maker, I think it was like a very like natural and organic transition, right.
Epicenter
A highlight from Elias Simos: Rated Network - Reputation for Machines = Transparent Blockchain Infrastructure
"Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Felix Lötsch, and today I'm speaking with Ilya Simos, who is the co -founder of Rated Network. Rated is providing node operator metrics and ratings for the Ethereum network. Hi Ilyas, and welcome to Epicenter. Thank you Felix, thanks for having me. Huge fan of the show since I joined the industry, so very, very glad to be with you today. Awesome, yeah, I'm also really excited to have you. We have a long history of working together in the staking space, and it's been really interesting to follow your path, and now seeing you build your own project with Rated, which is what we're here to talk about today. But yeah, let's start with the classic basics of, you know, how did you get into crypto and ended up where you are today? Cool. So first touch with crypto started in 2013, I used to live with a really good friend of mine, he found out about Bitcoin and he started talking about it non -stop, started building stuff, talked about it even more. Initially I thought he was kind of nuts and didn't really get it, but then the more we talked about it, the more I got it, but didn't really pay attention too much. When it really clicked for me was in 2015, I'm Greek originally, and so in 2015 was the worst part of the decade -long crisis effectively that Greece was in, and in 2015 we had capital controls come in, huge referendum, should we stay in the European Union, should we break away, that means also like leaving the monetary union, issuing our own currency, and so capital controls was this really gut -wrenching period, if you will, for Greek society at large, it like crippled the economy, all the young people left, but like there are really visceral images that I still have in my mind of very long lines of pensioners around each ATM that you see on the street driving around, talking about 50 people, 100 people, blocks like whole blocks worth of lines, waiting to get their weekly ration of money, and so at that point like I had the sort of the light bulb moment regarding Bitcoin, I was like okay I get it now, non -state money, you're not beholden to this idea of institutions and the way institutions work in the modern financial system, and I really found that appealing, so then started you know researching more, but again not being like very involved, it all sort of came together in 2017 with Ethereum for me, and this whole idea of you know applications that you're able to build on a platform that has like the properties of Bitcoin, but then can extend this logic sort of arbitrarily right, like the vision of the world computer and so on, so spent the whole year just researching stuff, trading, trying to build things with friends, but by the end of it I look back and I was like well you're having like so much fun, and you resonate with like the whole mission of self -sovereignty, and just building something better than kind of the alternatives which is kind of what is the status quo, and I decided to commit myself full -time to the space, so I got a job with a fund called the Central Park Capital, they were just starting out back then, I was the first hire that they made as an analyst, I stayed with them for three years, made a bunch of investments, built a pretty expansive data platform while at the fund when you know Dune didn't exist, token analyst was like one of the earlier data companies that were looking at blockchain analytics specifically, and helped them raise a 75 million dollar fund too, and then I left, and I joined the startup called Bison Trails, which at the time that I joined was, I think it was employee number 20 or so, I was a protocol specialist there, I think it was the second ever person to be called a protocol specialist in the industry, although I know you have been doing like very similar work in your history in the space, so the first was Victor, was my colleague who hired me in basically, and at Bison Trails, as it was validators as a service, that's what we were building, we ended up building a pretty large platform I think at the top of the market, it was north of 30 billion dollars on platform, a year later we were acquired by Coinbase, and then I stayed there for another year before I branched out on my own to Foundrated with my co -founder Aris, but super happy to talk to you about the of internals the story there, but I want to let you ask whatever questions.
Mark Levin
An Excerpt From Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Essay 'Disuniting of America'
"The cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences intensifies resentments and antagonisms drives deeper and awful wedges between races and nationalities. The endgame is self pity and self politicization but of course this is the goal now the Democrat Party in their media and their Marxist structures. Schlesinger makes the point that for generations blacks have grown up in an American culture in which they have had significant influence and in which they have made significant contributions. Self Africanization after 300 years in America is play acting. Afrocentricity, he's writing, as expanded by ethnic ideologues implies coraphobia, separatism, emotions of alienization, victimization, paranoia. Most curious and unexpected of all is a black demand for the return of black white segregation. My God was he on point. Schlesinger laments quote that the revival of separation will begin if the black educator Felix Boateng is his way in the earliest grades. The use of standard English is the only language of instruction, he argues, that is Boateng aggravates the process of deculturalization. In other words, you need to deculturalize people so they're not assimilating but it states that they hate their country. He wrote a culturally relevant curriculum for minority children would recognize the home and community dialect they bring to school. So of course, Schlesinger notes, not all black educators share Boateng's view these but days many educators of all races and ethnicities do.
Epicenter
A highlight from Stephane Gosselin: Frontier Research - Solving Ethereum's MEV Problem
"This is App Center episode 511 with guest Stéphane Gosselin. Welcome to App Center, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Frain and I'm here with Felix Lutsch. And today we're going to speak with Stéphane Gosselin. He is the founder of Frontier Research. Frontier is a sort of new MEB -focused company, but he was also previously one of the co -founders of Flashbots and I think sort of the lead architect, I think if that's correct, or product designer or something like that, at Flashbots. So thanks so much for joining us, Stéphane. Yeah, thank you. It's always a pleasure to get the chance to come back on this podcast and chat with you guys. Yeah, absolutely. It's not the first time. Actually, maybe you can just get started in there. I think this is a great question. So 2020, you wrote a blog post, a post on ETH research titled Flashbots front -running the MEB crisis. So this is now three years ago. And I'm curious just if you can like reflect a little bit, sort of looking back, I mean, you called it back then, like MEB crisis, I'm curious, what did you, what was your understanding of like the MEB crisis and like, what does it look like today? Are we in an MEB crisis? I was forced to like think back on this actually earlier today. Someone asked like, do we actually have a counterfactual to PBS? Like what would have happened if we hadn't launched MAF Boost? Would we actually have a significant different distribution of concentration on the validator side? Or would it look like pretty similar? The MEB crisis was basically the thesis that said, if there wasn't action taken by the community and early Flashbots members who've sort of felt responsible to take this action, there would be an increasing concentration of hashing power because the level of activity on Ethereum was increasing to the point where MEB became meaningful. I remember during summer 2020, DeFi summer, we had all of the sort of start of the yield farming and like really you to swap getting traction for the first time with all the liquidity mining programs, was it YAM finance and all this, this, this good stuff. And so it was clear that, you know, whether it's token sniping, arbitrage, whatever else, there was an advantage of operating this at the validator level and validators weren't currently doing it, the activity was happening through the transaction pool through sort of gaming the algorithm that the miners run for packing blocks. So the crisis was, well, it's very clear that miners have the advantage in doing these games. They are likely to like start to invest into running things themselves or run custom clients, make partnerships with trading firms to be able to extract some of that value. And that has the potential to lead towards more concentration because there's sort of increasing returns to being the ones that play this role. Maybe there is a better mechanism that we can develop and launch that enables to maintain transparency over what is sort of happening in the system and maintain open access to it. So make it so it's not, doesn't require a special deal with validators, but you can freely connect and participate and finally have some way to sort of redistribute the value to the actors in a way that's like welfare maximizing or whatever definition that you can have. So that's, that's the MEV crisis. You know, you sort of mentioned like, Hey, you wrote this post and you made it on e3 search. And then I'm like thinking back to like the last three years of my life. And I feel like all I did was write two posts and like everything else was like fluff, right? Like I wrote this from running the MEV crisis, which was like a spec for MEV -Geth, which was like the client that we developed and then ended up getting adopted by miners. And the second one that I wrote was introducing MEV -Boost as a spec. And then maybe like I should have just written those things and just like, you know, went to the beach and did nothing else the rest of the time because those specs alone, I feel like move the needle into like what the infrastructure looks like. And were like the most impactful things that I really did. So yeah, I sort of, there's this like really fun progression from, you know, there not being any infrastructure to now having gone through two major cycles of the MEV infrastructure changing on Ethereum. And do you feel like these, both of these things had the impact that you hoped it would? In terms of mitigating the MEV crisis? Yes. Yeah. Not really. Not really. I mean, it's, it's like hard to say. It's like chief to nowhere else. Is that what's happened or? Yeah. I mean, it's like, it achieved that, like the outcome in terms of like, it's a system that got adopted and like everyone got excited about it and, you know, introduce a new industry and ecosystem with a lot of people that are having open discussions about these things and implementing alternative solutions to them. There may be crisis in itself. I mean, one can debate whether it's a crisis at all, if it ever was actually there, or if it's just like a natural way that an industry evolves and whether, you know, whether it was MEVgeth, MEVboost, or something else would have happened, the end results would have been the same and we would have ended up in the same location. And at the, at the end of the day, I don't know that the amount of concentration that we have at the stake level today is like meaningfully different than what we would have if we didn't have PBS or like any sort of MEV infrastructure. Maybe we have more transparency in how the system works because, you know, we have sort of this open pricing mechanism where the information is being like routed through. We have like a dollar value for like the price of blocks and you have some nice dashboards that like allow us to show it. Like maybe there was some path dependency there that's different. In terms of like how things are evolving, it seems like pretty inherent to the way that blockchains are designed that the end result will end up being very similar. Maybe just commenting here one thing, at least I do feel like reasonably confident that MEV did not increase validator decentralization in a meaningful, like was not a meaningful driver for validator centralization on Ethereum. I think that's pretty clear. Yep. So I think from that perspective, if you take, if you take like, you know, concentration on the validator level, then I think if that's the kind of criteria, then I would say like, yeah, no, I think it worked out right. Like that, that didn't happen. Or it happened to some extent for other reasons that were unrelated to MEV I Right. It didn't fail. Yeah. We don't know if it was necessary, but we know that it didn't fail. I think the thing that I'm the most excited about in the end, and in particular with the introduction of, of MEV boost, like, so MEV geth was like a really simple solution and it was like, get FlashBoss to run a server and then like route all the MEV through the server and then like multiplex it to like the miners. And it was just like introduce like FlashBoss as like a server that like runs the MEV market. MEV boost is a much more sort of open system where you have a lot of different layers to it and a lot of room for individual entities to compete and offering additional services. Right. Just the introduction of the block builder role and the relay role has sort of meant that this thing of operating an MEV market that the FlashBoss was doing now is being done by like, I don't know, six, seven, eight companies. And there's quite a bit of turnover, I think in the dominance of these parties. They're like trying to figure out how to like make it sustainable, how to have a new model and competing for features that they develop. I think that's all very positive because it brings a lot more diversity to the way that these systems are being iterated upon and just the number of different perspectives that are being reflected into the architectures that they get adopted. So that to me has been like quite successful. If nothing else, just having more different stakeholders are involved in this infrastructure, providing services on top of it. That seems like a quite a decentralized way to approach infrastructure development. So it's almost like the third thing you did, right? Like, I guess formalizing this MEV supply chain with the different actors and how you can break them apart and then how you can like separate the roles. Did anything change in that perspective from how you looked at the MEV supply chain during MEV boost and like nowadays? Or has that anything you haven't foreseen or something? I don't think there's anything that I haven't foreseen. I think what I've been trying to introduce as like a reframing of the MEV supply chain is to think of it less linearly and think of it more as sort of a chaotic set of games. I presented a little while ago and we wrote this blog post with Frontier about infinite games and introducing this idea of a transaction supply network. So instead of thinking of MEV supply chain as being like users originate MEV and then it sort of gets sort of funneled through this system of extraction all the way to the validator, instead do you think about a cluster of a bunch of different infrastructure components that, yeah, it originates with users, but depending on, I can say they're intense, like whatever they're trying to achieve in interacting with the chain, they get routed through different sets of specialized infrastructure that leverage tools like auctions, that leverage tools like privacy to provide those services and capture those systems, like reflect that value back to the user and provide the utility that the user is looking for. It's kind of like this thing to say like, okay, MEV is like a land through which you can see the world, right? And once you start to look at like bridges, you look at exchanges, you look at all these different things from the MEV lens, it's like a toolkit that allows you to analyze them and understand how do the dynamics play out if you set this up in a decentralized setting. I think it's useful to have this lens, but still look at all these components individually, all these games individually, as opposed to say like there's only one game here and it's like the MEV supply chain and like that's the only thing that matters, I'd rather look at individual components. Can you talk a bit about your vision for Frontier Research? Like what do you hope to build, like what kind of organization do you hope to build and what kind of impact do you hope to have on the MEV landscape or crypto more generally? Yeah, Frontier Research, so I left Flashbots at the end of 2022, like beginning of the fall of 2022 and I sort of took some time off and decided like, is this something I want to continue working on? Do I want to continue working on MEV? I felt like there was still some contributions I had to make to the space and so started sort of a research organization around this that helps working with various different teams that are participating across the entire ecosystem of MEV infrastructure, help them sort of up level the level, their understanding and mental models around MEV, help do some analysis over the system that they produce and advise on good market and whatnot. So we've been doing that for quite a few months now, since the beginning of this year. Now we've started looking more active, like, okay, where are the opportunities for developing products? We've started incubating a block builder called Faith Builder that participates in this game. I sort of see very abstractly the set of games as being an abstract set of two two rules. You either have a message passing system with some rules over how these messages are handled and aggregated and you have individual agents that can be called like solvers or searchers or block builders or whatever else that aggregate these messages and then solve them, optimize them according to some objective function. And so the block builder that that we're running, we see as being sort of fundamental to enabling the development of all these different games across the ecosystem and participating in them and helping them bootstrap to provide better user services. So it's the generalized solver that aims to participate in all of these different these different blockchain games. So, yeah, that's that's sort of a venture that we're that we're incubating from from the friendship team. So this means like it's it's a builder in the Flashbots MUV Boost, but it could also be a solver, maybe, you know, I don't know, for for Cowswap or like, you know, other products like that. Is that correct? There are there very similar games at the end of the day.
Epicenter
A highlight from Marko Baricevic: Cosmos SDK - The Internet of Appchains
"Welcome Epicenter, to the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Felix and I'm here with Mihai Roy. Today we're speaking with Marko Bericevic, who is the product lead of the Cosmos SDK. Cosmos SDK is a framework to build application -specific blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. I'm Marko and welcome to Epicenter. Hey, thanks for having me. It's definitely an honor being on the show that I've been listening to for so many years. Yeah, we're super glad to have you as such a long -term contributor to the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. So yeah, we're very excited to hear today about the Cosmos ecosystem, but as usual, we get started a little bit with your background and in crypto and how you got started and what brought you to where you are today. Yeah, I had a bit of a different entrance into crypto. Actually like during the 2017 ICO boom, a bunch of friends of mine were making a bunch of money and before that I read about Bitcoin, but never got fully into it. They're making a bunch of money and for some reason for me, I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to go make a bunch of money. I was like, I want to learn how this stuff works and why it is decentralized. And around that time is when I started to really dive deep into learning how to code. And then soon after that, I joined a enterprise blockchain company and that was a lot of fun. We were using Quorum from JP Morgan and writing a lot of smart contracts, writing a lot of tooling around that had a couple of fun projects. I find that consultancies are a lot like hackathons. Like every two, three months you have to develop a product and they just give you the specs of the product and you just have to write code. So it was a lot of fun. Learned a lot. And then I ran across a, like one of the senior engineers at the enterprise consultancy showed me a video of Ethan Buckman and Jake Kwan talking about the Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK at a Bitcoin meetup in like SF and I just remember becoming so enamored by it. And I was just like, I don't care where in the world this is. I just want to work with these people. And then a couple of months later I found out that they're actually, they have a team based in Berlin. And so I applied and then it took a bit of persistence. And four months later I joined All in Bits or Tendermint Inc. And the rest is history. I started out as a developer relations engineer and worked as an engineer on Tendermint for two years and then came back up to the Cosmos SDK. Right. Yeah. Awesome. So this is like you getting started. What year is this? I joined 2019. So like two months after the Hub launch, after the Cosmos Hub launch. And then I guess, yeah, now you're familiarized with Tendermint and you started to work on the Cosmos SDK, which we're here to talk about today and maybe for the listeners, right? Like you can explain a little bit on a very high level what the Cosmos SDK is and maybe how it has moved through the history since I think it's right. It's probably like the most integral part of Cosmos ecosystem in some way, right? So it really helps to get some context. The Cosmos SDK, like Tendermint, has had a few teams working on it. The Cosmos SDK, I think, were on the third team. So initially it was written by the team at All in Bits, which included Alex Bez, Rigel, Aditya, Dave, Sunny, Jack, Samplin, Zaki, like they were all involved. But back then it was a lot different than it is today. Like it was kind of all there was back then was forking Bitcoin, forking GATT, and then early days of Substrate and the Cosmos SDK. And that was really it. There wasn't much out there in the ecosystem, so there wasn't much user feedback. And then when Cosmos went through what we describe as like Gore 2020, the great organizational restructuring, we kind of like shifted and moved into a new team, Rigel Network, and they became the sole owners and maintainers of the Cosmos SDK. And they led it for about two to three years. And then I came in to kind of like the Cosmos SDK has this thing of it's very hard to hire a project manager because you get burnt out really fast because you have to deal with an entire ecosystem of people complaining, people asking for features, people wanting different designs, and it's just constantly like a feedback loop now, more so than it was before. But not only that is you have to also keep up with what's going on in the wider blockchain ecosystem. So it's like a certain balance to strike and there's a few people that attempted it and then kind of just gave up, you know, just too much work and too much overhead and too much craziness. I like to attribute my like not being able to be burnt out to Zucky and Jack just because they also just like constantly work. And so I learned that from them, but yeah, so came into the Cosmos SDK, started leading it alongside Regen. And then this year the entire like maintenance of the Cosmos SDK shifted to a new entity, Binary Builders, which the core focus of that entity is the Cosmos SDK and the builders program, the Energy and Builders program. So I guess maybe we can, you know, get into like what is the Cosmos SDK as well. So I guess most people are familiar with the notion of the smart contracts and Ethereum and you are building your application, you're building a smart contract. Now the Cosmos SDK is essentially the first or like one of the first like frameworks to build application specific blockchains. And that's become like much more popular nowadays, this sort of paradigm, which we'll also get into. But I guess at the start, maybe we can just dive into why, why is that, right? Why is, what's the benefit over having your own Cosmos chain in this case over like just writing a smart contract? So I mean, there's always this like dilemma of the single computer to rule the world where we all have to share computation versus like owning your own computation and then maybe posting data on this one world computer. And so the AppChain vision came from the need that, Hey, like we, well, first of all, the Cosmos SDK kind of came from like, Hey, we're building the Cosmos sub and we have this vision of AppChains and what better is it to like develop a software development kit, an SDK to allow people to build AppChains and this became, this was kind of like the early on vision and the Cosmos SDK, okay, now you can control your own computation. You can do a lot more things than you could in the Ethereum space or in other spaces because you control, you have a lot more granular control over your gas, your computation and over your logic as well. And so this really fed into, Oh, like we can really develop what we want to not be limited. And this is like when we had the like Cosmos summer, I believe it was like last summer or two summers ago, and we saw a lot of application specific chains coming up to Cosmos and kind of like really honing in on specific use cases for the application blockchain. Then I would say like people started discovering that like, Hey, it's actually a lot harder to get product market fit because everyone like in crypto, we have this like craze of like VCs come in, there's a lot of money and you launch a token, okay, now you have runway. Now you have X amount of years to figure out your product market fit. And a lot of people were kind of like going with that. And I think not only in Cosmos, but in the wider ecosystem. And then it all of a sudden shifted to like, okay, now we have to go. Now I believe that we are going into a world where we have to have a PMF before you launch your chain. Otherwise it's just going to be kind of a empty chain, no blocks and so on. But today it's like a, the SDK really like the sole purpose that by default it is able to do is like a application blockchain application specific blockchain. And for this, like everyone thinks that Cosmos SDK is like, this is all you can do, but we are kind of like shifting into the roll -up space and it's like kind of a like, why would we want to like shift away from blockchains into the roll -up space? Well it's like, if you look at the blowing a smart contract, like a smart contract is an amazing way to really go to market really fast and search for your product market fit. And it's very easy. You can deploy different ecosystems, you can partner with these ecosystems and so on. And then like, if we put that on a scale of zero through 10, let's say smart contracts are the easiest. It's like a zero, you can deploy it same day, launch your, launch your product and you don't have to worry about inflation, validators and so on. And let's say deploying your own blockchain is like eight to 10 because you have to now control a binary, you have to control your validator set, you have to work with them, you have to claim centralization, you have to work through governance and all these things. It is very difficult. It's not a easy endeavor to take on. And we have been fortunate enough that a lot of people in Cosmos have taken this endeavor on and learned, and we've been able to take that knowledge and give it to newcomers. But the problem is like, what is that in between? And that in between I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that it's kind of the rollups. So you have like the two, four, six, eight of the rollups from decentralized to shared sequencing to decentralized sequencing and that kind of like fills up. So it's like now all of a sudden it's like you deploy a smart contract, you're gaining a bit more adoption, but you don't know if you want to invest all this money into developing your own chain and doing a whole migration. So let's do a centralized rollup if you don't need the decentralization part. And then you start wanting to expand your product, then you go into the decentralized sequencing and then all of a sudden you're like, okay, wait, actually like we are seeing that we're paying a lot of fees to these different protocols for data availability and settlement. Now it's time that like, okay, maybe we own this for ourselves because our token may have a lot of value, a large market cap, and so then let's go to our own chain. And so I'm kind of seeing that as the direction that people are starting to go. And I think DYDX is kind of the perfect example of that. That's really interesting. Do you think that if the future customer journey is, is going to look more like DYDX, started off in a smart contract on Ethereum, then went to an LDO or a rollup in this case, Startmet. And then the third step to come in a couple of months, maybe is their own Cosmos chain. Do you think there's a, there's a risk that the Cosmos SDK is developing the application chain development framework, but it doesn't really have like a rollup development framework and ecosystem today that by default people will go and develop in the, their rollups with the Ethereum stack and then jumping from a rollup, working on the Ethereum stack to Cosmos SDK will just prove so much of a big software development challenge that nobody will actually go into the Cosmos SDK stack in the future at all, but rather some other stack will. So in this sense, we are like shifting a bit. So the idea, so we're working very closely with the Rollkit team from Celestia and teams like Dimension, and the goal there is that in the ideal world, so now we're doing it some refactors of the core layer, in an ideal world, the user will potentially, let's say a user developed a smart contract on Ethereum, now they want to still settle and do DA on Ethereum, they can use Rollkit with SDK, let's say with Polaris or Ethermint, and then they just migrate their contracts. They have the same UX, the users don't know there's a difference. And then in the future, the goal is that they can swap Rollkit out for Comet or different consensus engine, and then the actual state machine will be able to stay the same. And so this is kind of the direction we're going with the user journey we're trying to create. And so, yeah, we're working, we were just talking before, before the call, but we're just talking about fraud proofs and validity proofs and how like Cosmos plans to take advantage, enter into that world. And so we're working quite closely with the Celestia and Rollkit team in order to really dive into fraud proofs, first of all, and then later on validity proofs. That's super awesome, and I think we're going to go much back into it. I think maybe we can take it a step back also, because most people that listen to this probably don't really have a good view of like how the Cosmos SDK is structured. So maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, like one of the core concepts in my view, right in the Cosmos SDK is this idea of the modules, right? You have like these sort of swappable features that you can kind of plug into your chain, or you build a new module that, that kind of can be used by the rest of the Cosmos SDK in your custom. So can you talk a little bit about that? What sort of modules are there? Warren is first being built. So like the SDK and the direction that we've been trying to articulate it to users and new users coming in is it is a separation between the kernel space and the user space. And when I say the kernel space, this is like where the modules live. And so the thing why we consider it the kernel space is because you can handle a lot more computation at this level. The functionality GAS is a lot more freeing and it's not limiting like you would have in a virtual machine. And so some of the modules are like staking governance, bank, some like authorization modules you have slashing, minting, distribution, kind of like these basic things. And these things they do and they do go by themselves in terms of like they don't need external intervention to it in order to like mint a bunch of tokens and everything. So they do handle a bit more computation. And so when users come to the Cosmos SDK, it's like, hey, like a lot of users are using VMs and we're totally fine with that. Then we encourage people to use VMs, especially if they're going into permissionless environment that they just want users to deploy like Juno and AVMOS and others. But like the kernel space is really where the application has the most performance, but also has the ability to do a lot more computation for the functionality they maybe want to do from the VM. So maybe the VM calls into the user space, so the VM calls into the kernel space, the modules, and then they are able to do a lot more, a lot more things there. So what can you like expand on, like what some of these things might be? I think like some of the things that like a VM would be limited by? So like within a VM, it's like you are gas metered. So you consume gas on every functionality, all the functionality, all the business logic. And so you don't want users to do a lot because it is potentially a permissionless environment. And so allowing people to have kind of unlimited computation is a DOS vector. And so within the modules, within the kernel space, like that's more of the application developer needs to, they need to propose an upgrade, and then the upgrade needs to be adopted by validators. And so it's a lot more of a involved process. And so here the computation is only around IO, around the disk. And so once you're doing computation, like let's say if you're doing some proving or capabilities, if you're doing some bridging technology, within a VM, you have to do gas metering on the actual computation of the proving of the hashing and so on, while within the Cosmos SDK, within the kernel space, that is a lot more freeing. And so you can do it, and then that won't affect your entire block gas consumption. And a lot of people may think that like, oh, this is a DOS vector, but if it does end up in some sort of chain, of the chain slowing down, then it is actually the application chain, it was application developer's fault because they did this premeditated computation in their chain before, and it wasn't like an end user just like causing this a lot, causing this amount of computation to slow down the chain. Right. I think one example here actually, I guess it's sort of this reward distribution on osmosis, right, where it actually, like we have these epochs and then at the boundary, you need to compute a lot how, where the LP rewards go to. And this, for example, can slow down the chain just so we have an example. Exactly. Like the interesting thing there is, so there is like this thing in the Cosmos SDK called begin block and end block. And what these really signify is at the beginning of every block, at the state machine executes the transactions, what computation do you want to run before that? And then end block does the same thing just after the execution of the transactions. And so within this, like in osmosis case, they are doing a lot of computation for the LPs of the pools. And so that is like causing a lot of, causing the chain, the state machine to kind of slow down a bit. But this is known, it's like as more users come in, it's just like, I think it's now that the chain kind of just like stops, everyone's doing computation. And then once everyone's done with computation, it continues as normal.
Northwest Newsradio
"felix" Discussed on Northwest Newsradio
"-stars king felix send your perfecto felix hernandez a man a few words but in the role of all -star ambassador it was really good to be back here also in the all -star ambassador squad edgar martinez who says it's a fun experience as a lawyer going inside the clubhouse and looking around and seeing the best players in the game and you see yourself like i'm one of the best players this year they give you satisfaction and it's a lot of excitement and you go fast but it's a lot of fun too edgar tells me it means a lot to him to be a part of all -star week again this is all about fans the and about baseball helping the fans getting involved more with baseball is something that i enjoyed doing and there's then the star among current mariner all -stars julio rodriguez who says he's just happy to be with the fans i know they're going to keep bringing the energy and i know how this fan base is so i'm excited the other local all -star this week has been the weather which has pitched its own perfect game at the all -star game ryan harris northwest news radio after years on hiatus the joint base lewis mccord air show is returning this weekend it's been seven seven years since the last air show at jblm but this weekend will feature some of the most popular performers from past the this air show will feature the yellow thunder aerobatic demonstration team the erickson historic aircraft collection's b -17 flying fortress the torah torah torah dramatic recreation of the december 7th 1941 attack on pearl harbor that from a promotional video online military leaders tell the news tribune they felt it was important to bring the air show back for 2023 year's theme this is 50 years of women in modern military aviation and 30 years of women in
The Eric Metaxas Show
Hadley Arkes Discusses Judges Second-Guessing Military Decisions
"My conversation with Hadley Arkes, A -R -K -E -S. The book is Mere Natural Law, Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution. So, you just mentioned Korematsu. This has to do with judges not second -guessing military decisions. Talk about this a little bit. This is the limits of what a judge can do. This is after they accepted curfews for Japanese. Then they're now willing to stand back while Japanese… Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're talking about World War II? World War II. Japanese… They Japanese moved into the interior. Which is a shocking moment in American history. It was. So, what did the judges say at that point? Some of them, like Robert Jackson and Frank Murphy and Owen Roberts, said, no, this is really just racial discrimination. These are people who were born here. But these are American citizens who have rights. And the idea that their ethnicity would affect those rights is legally nonsense. Right. But you have the judges, other judges appointed by Roosevelt, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter, just taking the side of the executive and saying judges can't be held responsible for what goes on here. Judges don't have the judgment to sort of second -guess what is being done. That gets pretty tricky because we're talking about foundational principles and that's like saying, well, when they created the Constitution, they didn't think about this stuff. Well, that's the Constitution. But judges the may not be the best people to vindicate. They may simply have to rely on elected officials, Congress and the executive, to bear these things in mind and to honor the Constitution. So
AP News Radio
Santander's big night (3 hits, 3 RBIs) helps Orioles outlast Guardians 8-5
"Kyle Gibson pitched into the 6th inning during his 7th win in the offense scored 7 runs in the first two winnings as the Orioles beat the guardians 8 to 5. Anthony Santander and Gunnar Henderson each drove in three runs, Henderson said the early runs for Gibson took the pressure off. Oh, it's great to get runs early on the board 'cause that gives your pitchers some lingers and went out there and did his thing and then had tough a few hits at the end, but he went out there and pitched well and both been closed it down. Cal quantrill gave up all 8 runs over four and a third to fall to two and four Felix Bautista earned his 14th save. Craig heist Baltimore.
AP News Radio
Orioles overcome Trout's homer, drop Angels to .500 with 3-1 victory
"Kyle brandish pitched into the 7th inning, allowing one run on four hits while striking out 5 to earn a second win as the Orioles beat the angels three to one. Radishes lone mistake was a solo Homer to Mike Trout in the fourth inning. It's a really good team, really good lineup. I think our game plan we executed that today. Got a fastball out to where he could get extended on it. But yeah, really good lineup. Austin Hayes homered for the Orioles, Cedric Mullins and Ryan mountcastle each drove in runs. Gunnar Henderson had two hits, including a triple. Griffin canning suffered the loss, Felix Bautista pitched the 9th to earn his 11th save. Craig heist Baltimore
AP News Radio
Aho's hat trick lifts Hurricanes past Flyers 5-4 in OT
"Sebastian aho's third goal of the game gave the hurricanes a 5 four win over the flyers. I was able to gather a lot of speed and there was like a offensive gap there. So I just went for it. Martin H asked tied it with just .3 seconds left in regulation, allowing ajo to beat Felix sandstrom 28 seconds into OT. Brady Shay also scored, and frederik Andersen stopped 29 shots as Carolina expanded its lead in the metropolitan division to three points over the Devils. Tyson Forrester Noah Kate and Brendan lemieux each had a goal and an assist for the flyers. I'm Dave ferry.
Epicenter
Rebecca Liao: Saga Bootstrapping Chainlets in the Multiverse
"Rebecca, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Thanks so much for having me, Sebastian. Felix, it's great to see you guys at the center is regular listening for the entire team at saga. So really appreciate you having me on nice. Well, well, I hope you can return the favor by teaching us a few things today. Absolutely. I would love to learn more about saga and what you guys are building. And I think for me, it's an interesting thought experiment to try to figure out where this sits in the broader app chain, interesting security, modular chain, mesh network, thesis, there are a lot of products right now that are trying to implement different security models and it's interesting to try to reason about where they fit in the broader landscape. Before we do that though, please tell us a little bit about your background, where you came from and how you came to be the CEO at saiga. Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to dive into all those topics. That's what we spend all of our time thinking about at saga. So no shortage of things to discuss there. But in terms of my background, how I found my way to saga. So this was late 2021. So I'll tell you about my journey before the end. Sock is actually my second crypto startup. My first one was called ski chain. Cofounder there was Psaki, Mannion, who's one of the original builders and customers. So if you found each other a long time. And excuse me, I was focused more on the DeFi space. So it was providing short term liquidity to a small, medium sized businesses. And I was cofounder of COO there for four years, grew the platform to about 5 billion in annual volume and early 2021. I started thinking to myself, okay, I've been here four years. The project is on its way. I would love to see if there's a new adventure. And I've always been involved in politics. So I was part of both the Clinton and Biden presidential campaigns, both in 2016 and 2020. And in 2020, we actually won. So I began to think to myself maybe I should go into service and join the administration for a little bit. So I actually went to D.C. for a few months in early 2021. And went through the interview process, waiting for nomination, but I quickly realized through that process that I'm not really suited for federal bureaucrats, aid no surprise after having done startups for a long time. So I called up sake and said, hey, I think I'd like to stay in crypto. So Henry is me to our cofounding team at saga. Because we all believed that developers needed an easier time. Basically, of building in web three that they didn't have the full tool sets that obviously went to developers have,
AP News Radio
Nicaragua reportedly frees 222 opponents, sends them to US
"Around 220 prisoners from Nicaragua are heading for the U.S. after a negotiated release. Family members and a form of diplomats say the inmates considered by many to be political prisoners of the government of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega are on their way to Washington after an apparent bilateral arrangement at a room feels a former diplomat says the State Department has confirmed the large group were put on a plane to Washington early Thursday. It's a massive freeing of the prisoners seldom seen with fields as crediting the families for never letting up the pressure but of a J the wife of Nicaraguan opposition leader Felix maradiaga says that the State Department told her that her husband was on the plane. I'm Charles De Ledesma
The Dan Bongino Show
David Schweikert: Biden Has Weaponized Every Level of the Government
"You know that the problem I have with this again being a former federal agent myself I mean I did this exact job description GS 1811 federal investigator It's a different agency but it's the same description but the issue I have with it is there's an opportunity cost to this stuff You know when the FBI spends a lot of its time you know investigating pro lifers On January 6 people some of who were just there at the rally and had nothing to do with any of the illegal behavior And then spends a bunch of time you know four years investigating Donald Trump congressman there's a cost to the foregone opportunity You know miss terrorists you know drugs at the border There's a cost to this It's just not free Well look I do mostly taxes I'm a ways and means God I'm a senior Republican over social security So I do Medicare financing I do taxes I do trade I do the geeky stuff I'm really good at math I'm not necessarily good at screaming at people And well I am So there you go We're a perfect match This is like Oscar and Felix I'm sorry go ahead I didn't mean to interrupt you Yeah In some ways we are the odd couple Think about what's going on and in some ways this goes back to the first day of the Obama administration It was the weaponization of every level of government So you had fun from it works as a park service Well it turns out that person used to be a political appointee and the Obama administration was so brilliant It took all these tens of thousands of political folks and converted them into covered employees So you can't fire them And now we're sitting here a decade later and you're wondering why the Trump administration had so much battle to get the littlest thing done or why every time you turn there's another Republican getting investigated They're getting brutalized
Bloomberg Radio New York
"felix" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Blockbusters are here, making it a confusing time says Bloomberg entertainment editor, Felix Gillette. You see these huge projects, including this lord of the ring prequel from Amazon landing at this interesting time in streaming. Netflix has The Sandman, which is also a big budget sci-fi. The Lord of the Rings prequel is expected to cost Amazon over a $1 billion when all is said and done. This could be the beginning of a new era. Gillette says there's no telling if this is the start of an even bigger era for streaming or the summit of peak television. We're going to do more and more big blockbuster series or is this kind of like the grand finale and everybody's going to be like, yeah, maybe we'll just not make $1 billion TV shows. Well, perhaps the former has streaming services reached a major milestone this summer, according to Nielsen, drawing more viewers than cable TV for the first time ever. Erica hurse Kuwait's Bloomberg radio. But I know about courage, I learned from my adoptive mom. She said sometimes you just gotta hold on, and no we'll get through this. Mom, we are so high up. Hold my hand. No, you holding my hand. Here we go. Learn about adopting a team from foster care. You can't imagine the reward. Visit adopt U.S. kids dot org to find out more. I learned patience for my adoptive dad. All he had to say was. Hey, you got this. Just breathe. Hey. We're pretty
Bloomberg Radio New York
"felix" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Be a gym junkie. First up this hour, though, this week's U.S. cover story. It's all about how AMC entertainment CEO Adam aron has cultivated an army of followers who sent the stock soaring in a retail trading frenzy last year. Unique tactics, including mini membership schemes, free for all earnings calls, the comical stock ticker ape that's APE. And the bizarre acquisition of a 72,000 acre gold mine have grown the company's profile. The next challenge, turning the increased exposure into profits. With more, we're joined by business week media entertainment and telecom editor Felix Gillette, and the editor of Bloomberg businessweek, Joel Weber. In the time that we were sort of initially talking about this idea for the story, we were in the middle of the pandemic, people were like, hey, movie theaters, that's not gonna work out. And then lo and behold, AMC became this meme stock. And Adam, Aaron, was the CEO of the company. And it sort of was like, you couldn't have imagined a more theatrical CEO to be in charge of a publicly traded company. It happened to be the world's biggest theater chain. And he kind of met the moment in this amazing way where AMC became a meme stock. And he was very flamboyant, very amazing on social media. It really kind of made him endearing to all these retail traders. In the middle of all that, we realized that who is this guy? We have no idea. We have no idea what his backstory is. And he ends this amazing backstory because he came up through loyalty programs. So Felix and Eliza did this amazing job reporting this story. Felix, you know, you guys dug into his backstory so much. Why we see the right person for this company at this moment. Well, I think to an incredible degree, his entire career was really building up to this. Meme socks come and go. So you have to keep these 4 million retail investors. Somehow engaged and you have to keep them involved. You have to keep them on your side. You have to keep them loyal basically, right? And the thing about Adam is fascinating is he spent his entire career engineering these loyalty reward programs. And if you go back to 1979, his first job was at Pan Am, he did world pass. It was the airline's first loyalty rewards program. Back then, the whole thing was like, okay, if we want to talk to
Telecom Reseller
"felix" Discussed on Telecom Reseller
"Hello, this is Don witt with the channel daily news from telecommute cellar. Today we're speaking with Chris Felix, he's the vice president of sales in charge of education at cajita. Are you doing today Chris? I'm doing great. How about yourself? I am really excited about talking to you and just excited about what this year is going to be delivering to everybody out there in telecommunications and yours is really going to be focused on the educational area. So I know our listeners are going to want to hear a little bit about that. Before we do, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and some of your achievements prior to coming over to kojima? Thank you very much. Absolutely. So I have been in wireless telecom for over 30 years. I like to think that I started when I was three, but that's the memory that I keep to myself, I guess, but so 30 years working with pretty much all the carriers that started back when I was balancing mobile became Verizon, then I spent some time to spread that became T mobile. And for me, it's always been the opportunity to work with large initiatives of the carriers. A lot of the first. We created the first government wide contract. We created the first nationwide sales team. And the common theme in all of that was figuring out what was in need. What was the key driving force behind what our solution could bring to the table for these organizations? Because we know when cell phones first came out there were installed in your car, you had a transceiver in the back and coax cable running throughout your car and a roof mount antenna. And you got service in some places and others not. Now nobody would know how to live without a phone somehow permanently attached to their body and in some form of fashion. So I think what I've enjoyed over the years is just figuring out how do we bring it to the place where it's best serves the customer and helps them in their daily lives..
Podcasts – Telecom Reseller
"felix" Discussed on Podcasts – Telecom Reseller
"Hello, this is Don witt with the channel daily news from telecommute cellar. Today we're speaking with Chris Felix, he's the vice president of sales in charge of education at cajita. Are you doing today Chris? I'm doing great. How about yourself? I am really excited about talking to you and just excited about what this year is going to be delivering to everybody out there in telecommunications and yours is really going to be focused on the educational area. So I know our listeners are going to want to hear a little bit about that. Before we do, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and some of your achievements prior to coming over to kojima? Thank you very much. Absolutely. So I have been in wireless telecom for over 30 years. I like to think that I started when I was three, but that's the memory that I keep to myself, I guess, but so 30 years working with pretty much all the carriers that started back when I was balancing mobile became Verizon, then I spent some time to spread that became T mobile. And for me, it's always been the opportunity to work with large initiatives of the carriers. A lot of the first. We created the first government wide contract. We created the first nationwide sales team. And the common theme in all of that was figuring out what was in need. What was the key driving force behind what our solution could bring to the table for these organizations? Because we know when cell phones first came out there were installed in your car, you had a transceiver in the back and coax cable running throughout your car and a roof mount antenna. And you got service in some places and others not. Now nobody would know how to live without a phone somehow permanently attached to their body and in some form of fashion. So I think what I've enjoyed over the years is just figuring out how do we bring it to the place where it's best serves the customer and helps them in their daily lives..
InnovaBuzz
"felix" Discussed on InnovaBuzz
"On exactly exactly so so you know that's going back to and you're just touched on it and i just mentioned so. Imagine you watching it or other people that you know have have the at father and daughter relationship or father and son raid either or and then This this reliving. That phil. What i'll do is all trigger memories of of you know your his of when you know during that time when your daughter without old for example rates so so that's another way to china Kinda reviver reignites a the emotions. That will eventually parlay itself onto the brand so as match him. We look at your h. h. p. laptop. You're going to be thinking about totally different right. After the you know the the the scenario or the vad that i mentioned to you right. So that's the power of now really doing creating emotional stories and how that ties into you know the building a strong connection between the brand had the consumer or i will lewis's been absolutely fabulous felix on just aware of the time here and you've given us some fabulous examples and explanations of how neuroscience and and how bryan works and how thinking impacts on our behalf buying behavior and connection and then how can use that to establish trust established safety and build relationships at the start of any of vise journey. So it's really great. I think it's a good point now though to move onto the which is our innovation round. It's the same five question. I ask of every gifts and the idea. Is you. give some tips as we as we spoke. I think before we started recording ad tips to transform the listener by. He's firing some action today. Exactly so what's the number one thing. Anyone needs to do to be more innovative more innovative. Keep an open mind. I think that's not sluki especially right now with all the different changes People whether they're businesses individuals sumers is looking for better ways to do things.
InnovaBuzz
"felix" Discussed on InnovaBuzz
"Is you understand exactly You know some of the underlying mechanisms that are influencing their their ability to To create emotional responses or ties to your brand right so by being the c that he no brands and companies are able to opposition of south. As though they're having a conversation with consume with a customer side by side so so removes a lot of this kind of like emotional mental barrier. Which a lot of businesses and brands usually face when when thinking about okay I want to connect with my customers. And then becomes now like a one-sided type of conversation where the company is talks about themselves because they totally had missed the whole neuroscience part of odors near like mirror neurons. And you know that's the thing that really helps You know my consumers connect with My brand so just understanding that is absolutely key and one not really good example of that is you know what's the difference between the value associate athletic world of let's say a generic jersey slop a name on it of your favorite player and all of a sudden value of that sells for two or three times more like all. It is when you look at it. Is this like you know stitching red. I really causes you. Maybe like i don't know what it is but it's really measurable right but the but the fact is what is happening when when somebody puts on that jersey with a name on it for the team logo now. The mirror. Neurons goes his starts to draw these types of associations to that particular player. So let's say you know your favorite players. The best player in the world in a particular sport then what ends up happening is the kind of brings transform that person to reach that ideal The best version themselves as though they were that particular A state of superstar right. So that's that's how brands when when need to reverse engineer he no you the way to think about us like okay if we put his name on the jersey..
InnovaBuzz
"felix" Discussed on InnovaBuzz
"I'm your host young stress from an elvis and i'm really excited to welcome today to the inova buzzed podcast from edmonton alberta in canada felix. Ko who's a neuron mocatta and business growth strategist and also found. Oh happy vying. Brian welcomes the another bus podcast felix. It's a great privilege to have you. Here is my guest high again. This is an absolute pleasure as well. Thank you for having me as a guest on your podcast. Very happy to be here. You've got a background in biological science and in psychology and use that to help businesses understand what might say customers taken really understand that which is something that i'm very passionate about some really handed. Dig deeper into that particularly from understanding psychology understanding neuroscience and and how behavior that that typically out brian's dictate that but before we get onto that what. What's the impact you mike in the world today to startle perfect question with more guests. Yeah absolutely i think is the ability to share our knowledge You know and and make sure that the people that we share it with they able to apply in a very practical way where Dave of make the changes whether they're smaller large that will have a big impact in terms of their trajectory moving. Four so That's definitely the biggest one of my core values and mission is to make sure to connect with people but also provide value in a way where you know it would help them as a person or their business continued to improve anti thrive especially with everything. That's happened over the last eighteen months. I think people are a lot more open to New suggestions and innovative ways to complete certain tasks. Yeah i love that. And it completely alonzo and you can capsulated my idea of transformation really well and we talk about transformational marketing. And it's very much about. Human people means. Send an tools and knowledge that i can actually to michael changing this situation. So love exactly Very happy to hear that You know those values align all right said. How did you get to have a scientist. Dennis colleges get into business ending the marketing. He asked so. That's a great question here again. Like you know. We had this conversation. Let's say twenty years ago. Business was not even on the radar. So this is very miraculous when we look back. Cordola dots connect. But ever to look at you know and bring ourselves back this appointed time. It'd be. Oh like i never knew that this is where i would. I'd be at a certain point in the future and really this conversation would actually take place at a university doing my work on my ballot. Volatile sciences degree. At that time. I have come from a family where there's a lot of people in the medical field doctors as well and It was this paved the path to more. Look along the lines of Her me personally was a palm etry. So that was the forefront in terms of the career goal and the aim so that's where a lot of the biological sciences comes from southsea..
InnovaBuzz
"felix" Discussed on InnovaBuzz
"Understand is that when we deal with people whether it's a b. to see our b2b the promo brain will always be the main decision maker right so once again. If it's a be scenario how do you position your brand now so that it really signals to. Let's say the primal brain of the potential client that you want to do business with that. You're going to be a safe Partner to do business with welcome back. I hope you've had an awesome weeks so far. If you haven't listened to my recent conversations with michael dhillon of positioning experts and with dizzy bowlin of virtually source solutions. Then go check them out. But only after you've listened to today's conversation. I'm really excited today to have on the another bus podcast as my guest felix cairo. He's a nira marketing expert and business growth strategist with fifteen years of sales and marketing experience. He's been featured on major media outlets such as the huffington post. Ed week and authority magazine felix has appeared as a special guest on i major canadian radio show where he talked about neuro marketing and also the twenty nineteen canadian election. He also makes frequent appearances on the top business..
AP News Radio
1 to Go: Djokovic Into US Open Final, Nears Year Grand Slam
"Well number one that a joke of it just kept alive his hopes of becoming the first man in more than five decades to win a calendar year grand slam but not before intense roller coaster five said US open battle with the full state Alexander Zverev they determine certain eventually prevailed six two in the fifth set I know we want to talk about history and I know it's on the line and I'm aware of it of course I'm aware of it but I'm just trying to looking to what I know works for me Djokovic has now just one win away from making history and his remaining hurdle will be the second state Daniel Medvedev they inform Russian strike setting the twelfth St Felix or share the same to reach his third grand slam finale I'm Graham like us
Newsradio 970 WFLA
"felix" Discussed on Newsradio 970 WFLA
"Bay in coming on board right now is Felix Vega our W F l. A legal analysts. And, uh, Felix, we talked earlier about this this morning. Ultimately, the, uh, mask mandates whether or not we have them are going to be decided by the Uh, well, the Florida Supreme Court could that possibly go to the federal Supreme Court or go beyond the state of Florida? Not at this point, Jack. It's a great question and good morning to all of you what the judge did yesterday He was important because this was still the same judgment ruled against the governor, saying it's school districts across the state of Port. I could Imposed mask mandates for their students. And so what Yesterday's hearing was about is whether or not because the governor filed an appeal whether or not that ruling to Basically effectively be put aside for now and what the judge society is like. Nope. I'm going to allow my ruling to stay, which is schools. You can have your mask mandates. Governor will appeal to the first victory Court of Appeals in Tallahassee and then they can decide whether or not they're going to overrule Judge Cooper in this particular case, and so that's where we're at is the mask mandates can be enforced in local schools, the government going to not be in them. Right now, while this is pending appeal, so it will go to the appeals court in Tallahassee, and then it will go to the Supreme Court of the state of Florida unless the parents or the governor or school District files a federal lawsuit. That will then move it over to the federal court system. And then that couldn't raise it up to the U. S. Supreme Court. For now, it's going to stay in Florida it once it goes through that what? You're anticipating federal court system, then reaching the Supreme Court. How do you see this entire process? Really playing out from where we are now To what you can anticipate the ending. Look like looking like. Well, I think that The key thing that we talked about Believe last week when we were dealing with this issue when the first one we came out. Is that the governor? Really? He did two things one last year when all this was going on with With covid and the bands and mask and all this sort of stuff. He left it up to the local officials to deal with the issue. So you saw Hillsborough County, Pinellas County, Pasco County all impose mask mandates for going into stores and all these sort of things. School districts were allowed to do whatever they wanted when it came to getting kids back in school. Now one year ago, and so now, with the judges looking at I said last year, you said it was okay for the the local authorities do what they wanted to do. Now you're stepping in saying that they don't have the authority to do what they want to do in terms of the school district. And another layer of this is that you have that very important public safety issue with the Delta variant and a lot of the mask mandate rulings last year where they were challenged that came down to is as a public health emergency. What's the court said it was and they got the local government could do what they needed to do to keep local Their communities safe seem applies now is that we're seeing the search of the Delta variant, and that's what Judge Cooper's relying on to say. This is especially contained contagious and dangerous to Children. Therefore, the school districts have the authority to do this. What I'm wondering is if this is an issue in any other state or other places around the country. It is is this controversy is going on all over the place. We're seeing it here played out in the media because we are in Florida. And this has been an ongoing battle between the schools because last year You saw that the governor, you know, they forced the reopening of schools. If you didn't re open or you did remote learning they were going to withhold funding. Now the reverse is what he's trying. But the governor is trying to do is saying that if you impose a mask mandate, we're going to withhold your funding. And so you get into dicey legal territory with this when you're interfering with the school district who has the authority to govern their schools and their Children and the families that urge That are in them versus withholding, you know, sometimes state funding but also potentially federal funding. So this continues, and that's another way You can get into federal for Felix Want to change gears here As we heard at a California they're moving to be the first state to outlaw stealth thing now, stealth thing If you're not familiar, it's the act of removing A condom during intercourse, and they would be the first state to do so. My question to you is Felix. As odd as this topic is, how could you actually prove in a court of law that somebody removed that protection in the middle of the act? That's a great question. Why? I always loved playing lawyer against you. When we were in studio all the time is that that is a huge question is to prove was the kind of removed was a consensual. Was it not consensual, and then you have another evidentiary problem is affected. When do you have a sexual assault situation? Usually if someone is raped or sexually battered in the state of Florida, you typically have to get a rape kit done, which is a collection of the evidence. Of semen or bodily fluids from the woman or the man that was assaulted, And so that's when I saw that come up this morning. I'm like, well, that's going to be interesting to prove because of it turned out to be a consensual situation. And then it turned into 1/19 central situation gets to be very hard to prove, especially going to make it a civil lawsuit, which is the way I'm reading. It now is supposed to a criminal action. They're going to be a lot of evidentiary issues they're gonna have to overcome. Boy, that is so true. And of course, it's always great to get it done by you to get it all twisted out here and Felix Felix Vega, will you do well are wfld legal analyst here on am Tampa Bay. Thank you, Felix. Have a great day, guys, and we're going to be playing rack your brain coming up here in just a moment. Actually, we moved rack your brain. We're going to be doing that at 8 35. So get ready for 8 35. We're gonna okay. Yeah. Things moving around here. We're gonna have a guest joining us in just a few minutes. We're going to hear from the crisis center of Tampa Bay after traffic..
The Passing Shot Tennis Podcast
"felix" Discussed on The Passing Shot Tennis Podcast
"He came through but still fantastic. That we've got cheap. British doubles pairings. Still going strong. And we also have kim the night session. We've sort of touched the muni jackovitch brooks spe- saccharine versus on rescue wall. Are your predictions. No i named my predictions from nas site were shocking. We should really be mentioning them. We jovic brooks bears fascinating brooke. Spe- wildcard thrash night's session crowd full capacity probably going to be booing jackovitch or not applauding him not expecting see which do his Custody celebration baby after that if he wins it what. What your thoughts. How's it going guy. Yeah he hasn't been doing. That has a joke turkovich. I'm i think the long us going to get no. Yeah well. I think he's up for that. I like i think he knows that he's probably just accepted that. I think the best brooke speaking get is a set in tie-break kind of like how nishikori did i date and see anything happening beyond. I'm intrigued day to see how he will fare. I'm quite treat jamboree. Boy jason brooks because oversee. He's been getting of wins eight leeann. I haven't actually seen much fame. So i'm quite intrigued. See how he's gonna shape. It does feel anything brooks does. The is gonna be off. No it's just going to realize a joke of it. She's going to be like. And i took that personally. And then he's gonna kind of rampage through particularly if the crowd gallon his bat. We've seen in the pasta. The i think he likes. He can deal with that confrontational atmosphere. Yes he can. You can play the the gentleman and the the the the the you can play to the crowd if that being nice. But they're not not with him he certainly can handle it so certainly think jakovich coming three. I'm going to say i gonna say straight-sets i think brooks be will give a good account himself percent. I think jock fish will come through. We get into the business now and. I don't think there's going to be any more slip-ups really i think from chocolate to the final off to the semifinal maybe with with czar of the women's singles salary on the rescue wary gang with this because this feels much more much more. Even you know sacree as dumb welling grandsons association. What the semi finals at the french open on rescue overseas has been a usa pa- champion It's still a defeated. We forget which is completely stop thinking about what you have. You have you seeing this one. Yeah i like that good winning and loss round but that was against greet minin. Who's very different opponent. maria saccharine. So i'm gonna give you the edge. They like she still hasn't lost. And i think she's maybe going to be playing herself with each round into a bit more form and if she can just recapture what she did she is a guy. Then yeah i think if she. I'm gonna say undress in in straight-sets chalet but like claes a seven five seven six. Perhaps okay. I'm i'm thinking saccharine might win. This in three sets can see it for some reason i can. I can just see saccharine. Not letting go Staying very close to undress goo and just yet getting over the line somehow in in some in some sort of way perhaps yeah. I'm sure it will be. I'm sure be a very feisty affair that both both quite combative players on the call. And i don't think ondraskova will give this much lightly given all the you know the stuff. She's been history the fact that she plays so well on the big stage and the fact that she probably so many good memories of her on author ash. You know the fact that she's in the night session. I think would say that. Probably give us some confidence. But i'm so packing saccharin that undidahk in that underdog in the underdog. A little bit. So i think she revels in that position. I think going to soccer and we do have push back against puppet shankar as well. I think will come through in straight-sets she's again another player. Who solve slowly quietly going through the draw serving up as while. She's be doing it and she doesn't have a cage with sasha. Brian couldn't get into america because a visa. She say she said being coached remotely as well Which is very good so style. Coaching radius with everything going remain virtual. I mean pa probably have sympathy because she had also visa troubles. I think Earlier on i think we've Won't she she can play cincinnati. I think because if she was able to get visa visa hanna. Yeah something yes something that just have to deal with but We will. We will seem find out how that how that gets up. We'll be waking up our check. All checking on live schools to see how the how the drama unfolds tonight but sat list. I even joined listening to this round for round by round. Catch up with the passing show. Remember if you want to stay up to date on all the action to come at the serpent. Make sure to subscribe to us on.
The Passing Shot Tennis Podcast
"felix" Discussed on The Passing Shot Tennis Podcast
"Download. Tennis dot com. And let's move on to the men's side of drill because had a couple of results today and some from yesterday to discuss. Let's have a look at what we've seen safe today. We've had sashes zverev winning through against janik center in straight-sets six four six four seven six. They smashed kind of just had like regulation six. Four sets retinal labor until cut a bad game. that third-set was probably would have said shit. Senate will be annoyed with himself. He really should push that to four and then it could may be a bit more interesting but again ashiq. Another example of severe mental game really improving the season the fact that he was able to slam the door. yes yes. I think. Cinema hat opportunities wet. He would have expected to make them. But at the same time phys verify you shut that down and get it done in three sets not an easy opponent very impressive from him absolutely you know he said after the match you know that that was over dodgy gave me through it and You know managed to save the set points at center at and get get the job donovan in straight-sets because i she said if you're going on into a fourth well he knows they would've been embroiled. You could have got on longer but yeah gemini speaking. It was a high level kind of performance from from zverev. Bit weighed in the pace. Much press conference beat at every talking about how he'd won obviously the olympic gold and he made a comment about the. He sleeps with his gold medal because he doesn't have go friend and oversee in light of the allegations that have been going round. It just was a little over it. It would hit yet. We have an old thing to say The best thing to say yeah. We'll leave that's a we that i think But yes i mean the loss and they played a slam center. Had actually in a beaten variable are that was. When's variables was ill last year. The french but Yeah i think this was the result. This i pretty much expected. But we've say today had running a poker against loyd harris and fill that one was pretty even via poker and his pink back at his peak bag yet which came onto score again day. He was not gonna let that pink bag. Go funnily enough today. I think it had on approved a written on the side of it so i take no if he'd like written on himself because it gallery. Yeah exactly i just became a big talking point on social media She's quite off but it didn't didn't do the magic power because he did lease in four sets to to lloyd harris. He's he's quickly kind of becoming quite thing he's had some good wins hair. He's going to be upset. I always the top thirty in the world. So he's radi putting together a very impressive tournament yeah. He has been very very very very good discipline particularly his serving. I mean it his match against palca a he won ninety two percent Of points on his serve and he was having it. Seventy six percent say it sort of reminds me of the dub biz. Bertini was it was starting out What is the school season He's he's just playing one match time and is just being very very smoothly and is very impressive from him if who we call him early because of that win against the dow in in washington. Dc and east carrying on threes usa and now into the quarter-finals. It's very very good. I'm not racial where it's gonna lead him to of whether he could get to the the who knows but it was one of those matches day whereas a fan you kind of it like are they going to be eddie extended rallies these matches. 'cause we die lloyd. Harris likes to finish his finish points at the net and so does palca to be fat. Swim so you know it was maybe not one. Maybe for the the the the fans who enjoy may be a bit of point construction an extended rallies but certainly for loyd harris to get done in four sets over a palca not only only take into one tiebreak actually that that was very very impressive so you must be returning serve very well as well as a pocket didn't didn't seem to have Much answer for much answer. Very after that i yeah i saw a stat which Which say harasses. I think the seventh player who actually out aced a poker in a march along the likes of he people are is ner and medvedeva. He is he is he coming. Riches record well. I mean perhaps yeah. I mean that's going to be some beatty. I think he's quite they're just able to do more than palca was quite something he was. He has a. But i'm yeah we've go osco also against mataya bertini on at the moment as we're recording auto three love up in the second set But i haven't really been watching this avidly as we've been recording by off scouter falling over the net in the second game which was quite an interesting to say but yet we've got jovic tacoma's well against an edge and brooks bay but last night we had a match. I really wasn't sure. Which way gay. Because i thought it was again. Pretty pretty even on paper and that was francis. Tefa against phoenix oj. Elliot's seem and in the end. That was a full set win for faa from a set down four six exchange seven. Six six four so he has reached. Upper quarterfinal You know he reached the wimbledon final. And now he's reached the gold frano's hair he's actually the youngest man to have done that since dope poultry to reach back back grandson called finals over he is still a very young things about twenty s and he still say We feel like he's been around for years. It's just he through quite quite young. Well yeah and also. It's it's since since his partnership with uncle to- From the rap it's it's is really reaping rewards. Now isn't it we. It wasn't it wasn't necessarily a an instant instant fakes but certainly given the time that they have spent. They openly gelling really well together on its particularly working well at the slams and fact that he's into the quarterfinals is is very very good because this was a match. I think you know maybe a few seasons the guy particularly that third-set tie-break. I think this is much. He he may be would have lost against In front front of boisterous crowd. That third-set tie-break. It really did hang on that and he was able to come through. A six was very very impressive and he was able to kind of carry through. Because i do sometimes think whether he steps onto call a knows knows what he's doing like we know he's got his talent but does he do what to do with it and i think that's uncle. Tony has added to his game. He's he's telling him right now. You've got talent. This is what i want you to do. And i think that's what helped him against as well i think it helped him against A cfo who has had a very good run here. I think he gave a very good account of himself and again. I think it will be a realization to him again. He he can be one of those players who can reach the quarterfinals potentially Of a grand slam isn't far away from in this match. And i think it will give him good motivation in the future..
Back To Back
"felix" Discussed on Back To Back
"Like not make the thing and imagine like what would happen if i made the thing. It's way better than i like. No thing didn't work and you can try the next one hundred percent and it affects the way you make creative choices because if you're if you're only making the thing to get to some eventually will end point then that's you've kind of already defeated yourself. Give you set off writing this album and your goal was. I'm going to have platinum records. And i'm going to headline festivals as opposed to. I'm going to make a cohesive body of work with my friends and do something fun like that changes the outcome wildly right. Yeah one hundred percent that you brought that up because anything. I can read about process and less about outcome. I like eat that up so much because it's because if you have like all like i could have goals. Goals are different. Because they're kinda like not pinpointed but you know if you have a specific thing for for like a project you did and it doesn't hit that then like in your brain that whole thing could feel like a failure which is like. That's a little break you i think. That's what makes you quit. You know. I always hear people like i have like if i don't do this in a year then i'm going to go back to like my other job. I'm just kinda like just go back to your job now. Arbitrary like like. What's the difference between like three hundred sixty five days. I'm like four hundred days. I you know what. I mean like you but you know if your if your goal is i want to be able to finish a song faster than i can tell us a song now or i want to be better than my song was a or like those kinds of goals like those are those are way better goals because the others like things other things will happen and always going to have the thing that you wish you also had with. You know like. I'll have some wins but then like i'll be thinking about this thing that i didn't have the win on and if you like focus on like you're you're you're miserable so i find the joy in the work i think and then any of the outcomes you gotta just take sorta like the desert the bonuses a man. I'm right there with you. That's exactly how i think about it. But as we're talking i'm realizing also and this sort of goes back to what you were saying about like the older you get the more you realize you don't know anything is that we both know people who don't think this way at all and very successful people like i know people who i can give you. I can give you one example. At least which is a good friend of mine formerly brill's now. ls dream. And i think he would be fine with me saying this like he makes. He makes mood boards every year and he puts very concrete goals on these mood boards. Of like you know. Maybe it's like a picture of someone playing in front of ten thousand people or maybe it's a platinum a picture of a platinum plaque or whatever. And you know he. He's very into that kind of visualizing manifesting whatever you call it and i'm only using him as an example. There's plenty of people who i think. Think that way and are that kind of like goal oriented and so it works for some people. It would definitely not work for me but yeah it's interesting to or is it just kind of like there to remind him of like what he was. Originally focused on a kite line were no. I don't think it's a cut time line. But i think he does remake the vision board like every year bright. You know so. Y- ask him before talk too much about it. Exactly what he thinks. But no and i know people that that have those as well and i. I don't think that's yeah. I don't know if that's exactly the same. Maybe but yeah because he definitely wants your goals. Are i think or at least have been your head on some level if that's your only motivation is an elliott Yes seems like it seems like a lot of away everything on so like i wanted to hear my son. The radio day But if i put a timeline on squiggle because it took michael. I mean that's that's a really good point man because yeah that's the other thing is you can't plan for most of this shit. You can absolutely have whatever goals you want to have but like you also have to be aware that it's you no matter what you do. You can't make it happen when you want it to happen for sure. Mba people's mcmahon. I wished i still had goals exactly. I mean that's true right. There is like a minnesotan like maybe we're just too jaded at this point. I i'm always like yeah jaded or am i just because i get to so like when the album comes. Oh come out. And they're like people like all like how's it. How's the album doing and i was like. What is that what you ask. What do you mean. How was the number of streams. Are you asking like. Did i get five. Pm when people say they enjoyed it. Am i happy that it's exactly. I'm like i don't know and i know there are just asking it like i'm not like it's a nice question that they are asking them. They care like i. I'm not getting mad at this person. But.
Epicenter
"felix" Discussed on Epicenter
"Sure that so in a way i mean people were asking also knows. Protocol isn't in some form in l. A. too just because we have this chain orderbook and then we settle agree to a transaction on chain. We don't really see it as an l. too because we are really tightly. Integrated with layer one and every settlement moves funds from one account to one another and weird like directly using the liquidity of off layer. One at least in this in this very first version on the second v to bed in this in the kind version. We could envision a future in which we also have kind of circle route of balances inside the protocol and then it would probably become more of a layer to solution. We're actively looking into how we can use liquidity on other layer twos and combine them and may become like a meta protocol to aggregate and get arbitrage even across different a to solutions but yet it's very technically challenging problem. We haven't found a great solution to. How do you sort of compare the when it comes to this algorithm like this coincidence of wants mechanism is only taking the the flow at any given time without taking into account any of the liquidity that exists into these pools so so for context one of the things that i'm working on a project called osmosis and we're doing a lot of batching stuff as well and so we actually have a very specific notion of like the goals of our batching mechanism which is to create fair next and how we define fairness is if you take all the orders and randomized them infinite times. The execution price is the average of all of these random permutations this basically removes the e. b. so they there's no ordering games that can be done because no matter. What order is the most fair price possible but to do this we actually have to take into account the available the quality in the pool. How would you compare this versus something. More like what you guys are doing with coincidence of wants. I think i think what maybe the solution that you described solves kind of more practically is the is the this issue of compute computational feasibility of solving these kind of batch auction as a multidimensional orderbook discreet orderbook with with multi-dimensional uniform. Clear on prices. Which in itself is a very hard problem so like even harder than n. p. complete Definitely a very challenging to solve for a large amount of orders that being said kind of we are. We have a pretty good algorithms that can that can find really good solutions or even optimal solutions for reasonable amount of problem sizes at peacecorps. Here remain today and kind of under that premise to us at fields that having no ordering whatsoever Basically giving every trade within a block within the batch the exact same uniform clear price is just a purist kind of mechanism or the the ferris mechanism in itself But i mean i. I'm more than happy to also research. The project mentioned a little bit more. It sounds like a very practical approach to also get Yet basically order independent execution prices. One of the reasons i like trading on an am instead of an orderbook. Right is what. I'm in an orderbook. I always have this notion of like. Oh am i getting screwed by being on this orderbook you know. Why am i putting these market orders. I should be putting these limit orders instead and like just all this mental overhead. And what's nice with. An m is like market orders. Only i submitted. And i'm pretty sure i'm going to be getting a reasonably fair price and the slippage bound is just this mechanism to like you know. It's a failsafe mechanism where it's like all right. If if something's really out of whack you know have my slippage like kill it but with with this model it feels more like once again like it's an order book. We're now. I have to be very cognizant of the maximum best price. I'm willing to accept because you know then you take that into account in your surplus calculations and it's like now. I feel like i have to start gaming and thinking about like okay. What should i put the surplus. Overestimate my surplus to. So i can get a better return for myself and this just becomes a harder cognitive load for the users you have you run into this being an issue. I think one thing that maybe the the average user doesn't doesn't realize such maybe the purest form of how unique should work as sure they. They are basically placing a market order but under the hood what they actually doing with this limited tolerance they are in fact placing a limit order and with emi guests. Or with vm slash. What's kind of rising and just the fact that minors are playing these games at the end of the day you are. You are making a mistake today when you place an order directly on unit swap with large slippage tolerance because you are actually going to get your order filled exactly your limit and not a market price and so that that's kind of why why we think we can. We can take the for trading experience where it feels like we give you a quote. This is your market order. You have somewhere in the settings slippage criterion that. Maybe i don't know five percent ten percent of users understand what it actually means and it feels like you're getting a fair market price and we want to give the same experience to people on cow swap. Which is why we have done the same. The same user experience and under the hood just in the very basic as and that's today is most of the cases. You will be the only person that is trading at batch and we will actually go and execute your batch against the best on equity and win which then resolves back to you having chosen to trade on unicef directly with this market or fair market order just with the difference that you go through the silva which can actually protect you from emmy which can actually under the hood make sure that while you personally. I find with a zero point. Five percent slippage tolerance. The actual transactions that hits theorem just uses your one percent or even zero sensitive tolerance Because it makes sure that the transaction is not frontline but not front running your your intense and then one other thing that we are working on. Which of course is is a big endeavor but the best thing about a mechanism would be if it had like a true revelation principle where we could prove that it's the best strategy for all players to just give us their true willingness to pay and say well here's my price and there's no games to be played by over or under report in your your Your preference but yeah that that is ongoing research and ongoing work and and something that the best mechanisms have and we hope we can get to this also with by choosing the right objective criterion by maybe doing some more simplifications to the mechanism but fundamentally having bech auctions where true revelation is the optimus. Reg one citizen new version.
KIRO Radio 97.3 FM
"felix" Discussed on KIRO Radio 97.3 FM
"Felix has brought to us by Lake Washington windows and doors. Good morning, Felix. Yeah, this was a very special private ceremony last Saturday was held up in the foothills of the Cascades east of Carnation about 10 miles down a private logging road. A place called Black Lake. I was fortunate to be invited to attend. The occasion was the dedication of the monument, a huge boulder engraved with the names of two lost Navy Airman 23, Year old instant guest in maize and 25 year old Lieutenant Benjamin Vreeland. They took off one day 72 years ago in a little trainer. World War two. You're a single engine Navy plane they left from the old Sandpoint Naval Air Station in Seattle. What's now Magnuson Park for two hour flight. And they were never seen again. No, the loss of the sea flowers was a tragedy. But this event on Saturday was a celebration there about 20 people. There were also a kindred spirits. You know, these are these are my people, and one of those people is Sean Murphy. He's part of the volunteer team, the research of whom helped convince the Navy to officially conclude last October. The Lost plane is likely in Black Lake. And it was a big deal for the Navy to acknowledge that other volunteers leak or been a great friend of the show. We'll hear from both of them in a moment. Now there's also a very special guest in attendance. Dan Real and lives in Austin, Texas. He's the nephew of one of the lost flyers. Benjamin Vreeland was his dad's brother, The Uncle Benny that Dan was too young to have ever met. So Sean Murphy took Dan down to the edge of Black Lake. He brought along some of his father's ashes. And you let a small group of us be there with him. As he put those ashes in the lake, you know it was important to Dan into his mother. The dance. Father Theodore be reunited with his long lost brother, Benjamin. I mean, I feel like I was on a mission coming up here to do this to be here for this definite want to be here for this and to bring my father A little bit of my father E guess.
Newsradio 970 WFLA
"felix" Discussed on Newsradio 970 WFLA
"FM HD, too It's 7 23 and Felix Vega's onboard are W F L, a legal analyst and Felix. I understand another stand. Your ground case went before the Florida Supreme Court. Tell us about this one. Yeah, This is an interesting case, Jack. Because the court rules in 2018 that the standard ground laws changed in 2017, changing the burden from the defense. The prosecution the standard ground hearings. Before trial was not going to apply retroactively, which means the cases that were heard before 2017. We're not going to be heard again and that people the new standard would go into effect in 2018, and that would be the law going forward. This case has to deal with a very unusual circumstance where we have the defendant decided not to have you stand your ground hearing before the trial before 2017 could they now will go back and change their mind. And so the way that this work is this case was Aggravated battery case out of Leon County up near Tallahassee. And what the defendant decided to you, along with his lawyer is they decided not to have that stand your ground hearing before the trial. In 2017, and they asked the judge actually hear the consider the motion for a senior ground during the trial Now in normal case, what happens is that you can have your standard ground hearing. If it gets tonight. You still argue self defense a trial In this case, what they did is they argued self defense, the trial but then also ask the judge to say, Hey, can you get cigar? Stand your ground motion and dismiss the case. If you think that there's not enough evidence to go forward the judge night that and the kid's got Let the jury went to the jury, and he got convicted of a misdemeanor. Well, it is what happened in the case. I mean, tell me about how this came about or who he was going against her. You know what happened there? Basically it was just a basic fight. And it was not a murder case, which I thought was unusual that they would take this case all the ways of the Supreme Court to argue another retroactive attempt on stand your ground. And so when the jury came back with a lesser charge of misdemeanor battery, what they're arguing now of the prosecutors arguing now is say. Basically saying that, hey, he wasn't convicted of the charge that he was charged with. He was convicted every lower charge. Therefore, the need for seeing your ground hearing has already been resolved by the jury. And so with the court needs to decide in this particular case. Are they going to be consistent with their prior ruling about all these standard ground cases and saying they're not gonna be retroactive in terms of when you decide that you want to have these hearings? And whether another going to say that well going forward. You need to have a separate hearing. Not during the trial, which is what the caves happened here. The prosecutors agree that the judge originally should not have done this. They should have had a separate hearing. How where they're saying that the fact that he was convicted of only a misdemeanor jersey whole entire issue. And it should not be before the board right now. What's a precedent? Do you think this could set here? Felix? Well and then we get in the same president we have with the underground retroactivity issue in 2018. Will this open up all these cases that have already been resolved and decided either by a jury verdict by a standard ground hearing that was denied. And whether judges girl while these hearings to go forward, and this is a strategic decision by defense attorneys whether or not before 2017 when the burden was on them to prove They were acting in self defense when it shifted, the prosecutor's lot of times defense attorney says, Like Yeah, you know we're not going to go that route, because in the old version of standard ground, you would have to call the defendant as a witness to establish your standard ground motion. During that hearing that would open the dependent out to another cross examination before trial and exposed what the defense strategy was alive. Defense attorneys begged off of that. Before the rule change in 2017. Now the issue is would you have changed your mind and then something different before 2017. And should you get a second bite of the Apple now looking at the state of Florida feelings from what you're seeing? Are there a lot of cases that could fall under this and look at this retroactively? I think it's going the fact that they did not have any murder case that they're putting before the board says to me that there may not be that many that would be affected, however. The traditions are all over the place when they come to standard round Jesus The Tampa Bay Times to the huge article about this years ago when they looked at some 203 100 cases. Based on the race of the dependence versus the race of the victims. Like a study on this magnitude in terms of how many people decided not to do a hearing before seeing the ground firm strategic reason that's all covered by attorney plan privilege. So the attorney for the defendant would have to come forward and say, I wish I would have done this. Mm. Well, Felix Vega covering it Well, here with R W F l a legal analysis and we'll talk to you later, Felix. I'm good. Have a good weekend,.
Newsradio 970 WFLA
"felix" Discussed on Newsradio 970 WFLA
"Am champion May with Jack here in Italy and Katie and Felix Vega hours SAGES on hand here Right now on our W. F L, a legal analyst and, um Felix. We got somebody on the line here who was going to bring up something that I was planning to bring up with you here at the beginning of our segment, and that would be See Chris in Tampa's got a comment to make on the big parade coming up today, huh? Yeah, I'm a little upset that you know, I'm a lifelong bucks fan, and I'm just finding out about this now. I think this is Bush league move by our mayor, because she doesn't want people showing up. I mean, I'm just finding out about this now how much you have to get my son out of school and make arrangements for work. This is ridiculous to have this on a Wednesday on one o'clock, I'm just I'm baffled by this. You know, That's something we brought up earlier that there's so many people that are not going to be able to come and watch this thing. Because it's Wednesday. At one o'clock. People are work kids in school. All that stuff I suspected on Monday that that would probably be the play because with covert the pandemic, you want to kind of slide in there. I'm sure the mayor's thinking I wanna have it. I want to celebrate it, but it's not a lot of people show up. That's just fine with me. Plus, they also had, uh, you know the rain coming in this weekend choppy waters late in the week, so they had a bunch of reasons. Why the move it to a Wednesday and, by the way, don't mean closing of Laurel Street cast streak, Kennedy Boulevard Bridges along with Roaring Street and Platt Street. So if you're going somewhere Better get her done. Yes, Dad. I mean, if you're not going to the party than you know, avoid downtown, if you can, because it's gonna be, you know, pretty packed and I agree with air and I think you know this was because we're already hearing Chris treatment reporting about Possibility that all those parties that happened after the Super Bowl that you know we could have a super spreader, you know event so I can see the logistics of that, you know, and again, you know the covering this since I have for the past year. We're talking to the health department. They're talking to the police department. Try and figure out logistics wise, how they can pull this off and make it as safe as possible and not really packed downtown. But, you know, I just came in to work at seven. And so you know, a new Sienna LeBeau parade and I'm like I would have maybe like toe. Go to that, but I mean, sitting in here working. I wish it was the weekend to I could just tell you why. That's part of the reasoning. Is that why they're doing it mid week? By the way, The Washington Post and editorial about what a bad name Buccaneers is, It's like Jemima, all the others. Except it's, uh, killers and thieves and all that stuff on our our morning show back in 1976 was the one that had a contest and name them Buccaneers in the first place. It's your fault. So that means yes. Shame on you for coming up with something is nasty. Is that my high school football team was the Buccaneers. Yeah, I'd like a double block. I'm letting you know you're really Yeah. But what about the morning Pirates? Yeah, Tomorrow morning. We're gonna have another have Collins here If you come up with a new name for the Buccaneers, So remember that tomorrow morning, it's gonna be Your job to come up with a new name. Our listener. Anyway. What else is too well, let's take a break, and then we'll come back with Felix. It's 8 46. We go to the newsroom and Chris treatment and efforts underway to track any covert case is tied to the Super Bowl. Hills Road Department of Health put out a national call requesting information on cases associated with Sunday's game. There's concern some postgame celebrations will lead to a spike in cases as many people were not wearing masks. Computer breach of old Mars water supply should serve as a wake up call. That's what former N s a hacker David Kennedy says about last week's break in someone was able to remotely enter the system and dramatically increase the sodium hydroxide levels, but it was detected quickly and reversed. Kennedy tells the Tampa Bay Times it could have been much worse that the hackers were more sophisticated. There's a celebration today to mark the Buccaneers Super Bowl win, Tampa officials announced. A boat parade will start at one this afternoon on the Hillsborough River from Armature works to Sparkman, Worf. Fans can gather on the river walk or watch online of the team and cities Facebook pages. Some fans are complaining about the short notice of the event and being held in the middle of the day. The Buccaneers say they'll have another celebration sometime in the future. MICROSD. Franklin News Radio. W F L A Now it's Jack Sports W F L, A sports team that three by from the 95 www d A. N A. M 6 20 SportsCenter. I'm Erin Jacobson. The Tampa Bay Lightning made it six straight wins last night. They got the 6 to 1 win over the Nashville Predators on the road yesterday. Lightning six game win streak is the longest in the NHL this season up next for the Lightning. They will continue their four game road trip with the first of two games against the Florida Panthers tomorrow. Seven o'clock puck drop. Marty Schottenheimer. 1 200 regular season games with four NFL teams passed away yesterday he was 77 years old. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 2014. For more on these stories. Listen to Tampa Bay Sports Radio 95 www d A. N A. M 6 20 where you can check out.