Watch This, Too
To Be [a Mamaluke], or Not to Be [a Mamaluke]
Yes, the market dumped. Too much leverage in the system yet again. Fools still want to bring heroine to the cocaine party. Those same fools, all approximately 600,000 that were liquidated, are likely now feeling their hangover big time. I don’t use substances like leverage because not only does it ruin the party for yourself, but it also ruins the party for all everyone else. Bitcoin is for saving; it’s a savings technology. It wasn’t built for leverage. Don’t be a fool and trade bitcoin with leverage. And if you’re anxious about this crash, go see Uncle Ran; Uncle Frank isn’t here to console you or to manage your emotions (or your portfolio). I did, however, write a Tweet thread about how you can choose to react in moments like this.
That’s right, folks. I’ve resigned from my post as a university lecturer, and I’m going to hang up my Ivy League degree in efforts to become a full-time degen crypto influencer, so let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this edition of the newsletter…
I come to you this evening to share with you another video that I highly recommend you watch. A while back, in an edition of the newsletter entitled “Watch This Now”, I recommended that you watch “Raoul Pal’s Introduction to the Exponential Age”. If you didn’t watch it, please consider yourself a full-blown mamaluke. If you’re uncomfortable wearing the “full-blown mamaluke” name tag, then go back and check out the first video before watching the video below. Or if you’ve fully embraced your status as a full-blown mamaluke, then maybe see what the New York Times or other mainstream media outlets have to say about cryptocurrency and the new world that is being created right beneath your nose (and without your permission).
Here are some of my favorite excepts from the video:
[20:45-21:29]
Raoul Pal: “This is democracy [referring to the digital asset/digital sovereign state world]. It’s also something really exciting to me. The world is wildly polarized right now - left and right. But I think what this is doing - we’ll come onto DAOs in a sec, and NFTS, because they’re all part of this - is actually creating something that only exists in some places. Which is, it is progressive because it allows participation of everybody in a society, and it allows society to set rules, but it’s also free market capitalism at the same time. It’s like putting these two things together that are being fought over.”
[25:26-27:05]
Ash Bennington: “What strikes me is just how comprehensive this view of this space is, talking about reengineering not just organizations but the nation state, society, social organization more broadly; it’s a hard thing to get your head around. Where do you think this goes?
Raoul Pal: “I don’t know, but the more I reread The Fourth Turning, the more prophetic the bloody book is. And it says that all institutions will get rebuilt from the ground up. We’re rebuilding states, corporations, communities, money, store of value, economics all at the same time, done by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people of the smartest people in the engineer- economists, finance guys, technologists, developers, mathematicians; everybody is working on this. This is like- It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen; [it’s] mankind saying ‘Fuck it. We’ll do it ourselves. And we will figure it out. And we don’t know the answers.’ Everybody in the space, except the hardest core maximalists, said, ‘We do not know the answers, but we’re going to try our damnedest to see how far we can get.’ I love this. This is how it should be. This is one of the greatest movements I’ve ever seen, if not the greatest movement, because it’s political, it’s economic, it’s financial, it’s cultural; it’s everything all rolled into one damn thing.”
[59:24-59:34]
Raoul Pal: “There’s two zones. One is the comfort zone. And the other is where the magic happens. They don’t overlap.”
Great stuff.
However, please note that I do not necessarily agree with nor am I a proponent of everything that Papa Raoul has to say. I find aspects of this concept of the digital nation state as petrifying as I do exciting. Regardless, whether most of us like it or not, this is where we are going, so, in my humble opinion, it’s better to try to wrap your head around it now and get ahead of the curve as opposed to trying to catch up after the fact.
And that’s all for tonight folks. I plan to come to you again later this week with some thoughts on my favorite platforms for DeFi/yield farming, and I plan to share with you some of what I learned while under the tutelage of The Russian while on retreat from writing this newsletter.
Until then, take it ease.
Best,
Frank
Twitter: @frankcorva
