Alex Mexicotte (@mexicotte) • Hey

Host @peopletalking | Growth @livepeer

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Sam Simmons of Mintpass - Poker, Fandom, Gamification - S2E3 They say that game developers know more about human nature than psychologists, but gamers themselves are a close second if we can look at why we enjoy certain games over others. My guest this week is Sam Simmons, Co-Founder at Mintpass: a collecting experience that makes your travels a part of your digital identity. Previously he spent 9 years rising up to become the President at PokerGo, a world-leader in poker television. But his resume started where a lot of web3 builders start: MMOs. In this episode we hear about stories from Sam’s years spent around the highest level players in poker, reverse engineering WoW and other MMOs and why they’re so addictive, and gut check the difference between fandom and community (sneak peak: most web3 “communities” are more like fan bases). People listening: I hope you enjoy this long overdue episode. -Making the best decisions with the information you have. Not outcomes based. -Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke “Resulting” -Variance and volume in poker win out: https://www.888poker.com/magazine/strategy/understanding-poker-variance-will-help-you-cope-downswings -Quote: Game developers know more about psychology than psychologists. -Gamification done right: Attainable but challenging -Having different ways to do things well -Yu Kai Chou - Actionable Gamification: https://www.amazon.com/Actionable-Gamification-Beyond-Points-Leaderboards-ebook/dp/B00WAOGY4U -8 things that drive us to do what we do -Higher purpose - Narrative around why you should do something -White hat vs black hat - Some tactics make you feel good, others bad. -Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Bets-Making-Smarter-Decisions/dp/0735216355 https://www.quantifiedstrategies.com/annie-duke-thinking-in-bets/#:~:text=We%20judge%20the%20quality%20of,book%20called%20Thinking%20In%20Bets. -Every hand revealed - Gus Hansen: https://www.amazon.com/Every-Hand-Revealed-Gus-Hansen/dp/0818407271 -Zero to One - Peter Thiel: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 -Stoicism - Ryan Holiday - Daily Stoic: https://ryanholiday.net/ -The Messy Middle - Scott Belsky: https://www.amazon.com/Messy-Middle-Finding-Through-Hardest/dp/0735218072 -Atomic Habits - James Clear: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299 -Every action you take each day is a vote for the person you want to be.
Season 2 of People Talking is here with 2 new episodes 👉👉💥💥 People Talking is the web3 podcast that's not about web3. We bring on web3 heavy hitters and cover topics outside of web3 that influence how they approach the space. That's a massive sandbox to play in. Ep1 is with Francesco Bisardi, a crypto and AI OG where we cover how to practically use AI today for business and pleasure, alpha on high-signal people to follow in AI, and more. Also, he's an Italian powerlifting champion. That wasn't on my bingo card. Ep2 is with Jon Hillis of Cabin, a provider of coliving neighborhoods in nature for creators and remote workers. We cover everything from stories of working through the chaos of COVID to new theories of human nature. As always, I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed talking. P.S. if you can like/subscribe/follow/rate etc whereever you're watching, it really helps the show out and if it was onchain you would get credit but since it's off chain you'll just have to accept my gratitude 😁
Season 2 of People Talking has launched! 🎉 As a refresher, People Talking is the web3 podcast that's not about web3. Hear from heavy hitters in web3 talk about topics outside of the industry that influence how they approach the space. My first guest this season is Francesco Bisardi of Bitgo. Francesco has been in small web3 and AI circles since 2017. In this episode we discuss a lot of similarities he sees between the early AI and web3 communities, alpha on how to practically use AI today for business and pleasure, alpha on high-signal people to follow in AI, and how AI is somehow even faster paced than the most recent web3 bull market. Oh, and he is also an Italian National powerlifting champion. NBD. This is a well-rounded guy, the type of guest I love to have on the show. Enjoy! https://open.spotify.com/episode/1pn2gPjJHSUYlTdoyob8f5
Episode 12, the final episode of Season 1, of the People Talking podcast is now live 🎥 Hey People Listening, did you get your first foray into social media learning CSS and HTML to personalize your Myspace page? Do you doom scroll Twitter? Do you wonder about the elements of social media and which are good and bad? This week I have Lou Kerner on the show who is both a social media and web3 veteran to dig into social networks and community. Starting with his early days of helping run Bolt, an early social network started in 1996, he walks us through his love of community and how the new tools in web3 can help us create digital-native communities. Enjoy, and thank you to the listeners of season 1! I'll be taking a short break while I plan out the release of season 2. We have some amazing guests coming up. Stay tuned. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WbemQtKkdEmt9JnyL5imb
Episode 11 of People Talking is now live 🎥 Jim Chang (0xJim) is known on Twitter for his DeFi wizardry, incubating projects through Aave’s experimental arm, and hilarious but dense research on things like interoperability and rollups as a service. But in this episode we dive into 2 of his loves: Backpacking and Fashion. What relation do these things have to web3? What relation do they have to each other (hint: convertible pants)? A sneak peak at what we cover in this episode: -How does backpacking prepare you for product launches? -Why should you backpack even though you’ll be exhausted and sleep like shit? -How is the Steve Jobs style of fashion like atheism? -What is Gorpcore and why do so many adopters of this fashion trend like tiny coffees? We had a lot of good laughs in this one. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did. https://open.spotify.com/episode/08f8mxeH8FYF0h4yhfOegv
Episode 10 of People Talking is now live 🤙 David Goldberg is the co-founder of Macro which is a web3 security company that does smart contract audits with customers like Synthetix, MakerDAO, Frax, Connext and more. They also are building products for web3 security. Before he dove into web3, he was a software engineer at Salesforce for a few years and founded a few startups. He has synthesized his experience in startups down into guidelines for creating breakthrough ideas which we’ll dive into today. For founders, identifying potential inflection points - major shifts in the world that open up new markets - is the holy grail problem to solve when generating new business ideas. Join us on this deep dive on identifying different types of inflection points and articulating ideas to take advantage of those shifts. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bA8aVhi0Zkbt2C0IHh8Jh?si=woQKKDZbQKuP1TweN9OfkA
Episode 9 of People Talking is now live 🤙 ChatGPT has sparked a lot of new debate over the future of AI and whether it will be a net benefit or net detriment, usually to the extremes that it will either free humanity from the burdens of work so we can focus on our true passions or will kill us all Terminator style. When it comes to web3, how can we direct ourselves towards the former future? This is one of many things nintynick is working on at Hats Protocol. After reminiscing on the leadership skills and trust issues that gaming brought us both in our earlier years, we dive deep into what AI could look like for humanity if designed correctly and how Nick sees AI helping us more effectively delegating authority and responsibility in a meritocratic way. We both had a lot of fun on this one. Enjoy!
Bit-coin is sky-rock-et-ing and I neeeeeed caaaash nooooow. CALL JG WENTWORTH 877-CASH-NOW
Hey People Listening, have you ever collected Pokemon or Yugioh cards? Did you have as absurd of a Beenie Baby collection as I did? Did you try to justify all of this spending to your parents who reluctantly relinquished hundreds or thousands of dollars for this seemingly pointless stuff? This episode is for you. Episode 8 of People Talking is now live 🎥🎉My guest this week is Humpty Calderon, Host of the Crypto Sapiens podcast and co-founder of Mosaic. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1BoaWsCfSaKwR7JGup5PTw Humpty Calderon has always been an avid collector of many things: comic books and manga, action figures, whisky, watches, and of course digital collectibles. In this episode he shares his story of collecting, why he does it, and a glimpse into his factors for what makes something collectible. I don’t think I have to harp too much on why this is relevant to web3.
Episode 6 of People Talking is now live 🎥🎉My guest this week is Dougie DeLuca, analyst at Figment Capital and writer in the Cosmos ecosystem. In this episode we cover **music, aliens, and Native American history**. How the hell could music, aliens and native American history have any possible connection to web3? You'd be surprised. Okay actually the Alien conversation was unplanned and had no tie in, but it was still fun. Enjoy this wide ranging conversation between making music and how it’s a nice break for your brain from the screen, a quick debate on whether or not aliens have visited earth, and the surprising lessons from distributed communities of Native Americans and what they can teach us about designing our own communities.
People Talking: The web3 podcast that's not about web3
Episode 6 of People Talking is now live 🎥🎉My guest this week is Tasafila (Shane), creator of BlockbusterDAO (now R3WIND). Tasafila (Shane) is most well known as the founder of BlockbusterDAO which aimed to buy the Blockbuster IP in late 2021. We talk about his background in filmmaking and investigative journalism (there’s a fun story in this conversation about that) and how that positioned him to harness the power of nostalgia with BlockbusterDAO. Enjoy! https://open.spotify.com/episode/2pFcamWib3ZC5zUyPbn5Ok
Episode 5 of People Talking is now live 🎥🎉My guest this week is Pietro Moran, Head of Crypto Partnerships at The Giving Block. People Talking is a web3 podcast that's not about web3. It's a place for web3 builders and creators to talk about topics outside of web3 that influence how they approach the space. In crypto years, Pietro is a long-time friend and former teammate of mine from our college track days. He’s doing amazing things in the space pushing web3 use cases to an area that can hugely benefit but doesn’t get enough coverage because of lack of degen opportunities: Donations in crypto. As the Director of Crypto Partnerships at The Giving Block, Pietro is working directly with thousands of nonprofits to accept crypto donations and improve transparency and reduce transaction fees. If you aren’t currently donating crypto to nonprofits, this episode is for you. Enjoy!
Sneak peek into the live episode of People Talking recorded at ETH Denver with Pietro Moran, Director of Crypto Partnerships at The Giving Block on Charity and Philanthropy. Full new episodes drop every Monday morning.
Episode 4 of People Talking is published 🎥🎉 Steph is a branding wizard and head of media at Seed Club, a DAO and creator accelerator. We cover her life in traditional branding before web3, geek out over the marketing genius of Ryan Reynolds, and dissect the elements of good storytelling to use for your own projects. Hint: Storytelling is a skill and can be learned and applied to more than just Pixar movies. Enjoy! https://open.spotify.com/episode/2SgPuQ16GJdFDBGxsxy6oO
Episode 3 of People Talking is Live 🎥🎉 My guest this week is Stefen Deleveaux (@stefdelev.lens) covering Economics and Ecology. If you don't know who Stefen is, now is a good time. Stefen Deleveaux is the Head of Growth at Govern and President of the Caribbean Blockchain Alliance and one of the first friends I made in web3. Somehow, when you talk to anyone who knows Stefen personally he always comes up as one of their favorite people in the space. It’s hard not to like this guy. Not only is Stefen a great guy, but he’s a respected thinker in web3. He recently spoke at ETH Denver on better DAO contribution tracking (recording pending) and has spoken at many other events. And now his crown jewel of achievements: Guest appearance on People Talking (heh). Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4N1p65okWwjyGAhvYF2DFC
Overheard outside ETH Denver main venue from lost normies: "I think this is for that Ethernet thing."
Directions unclear, started ironic fashion trend
Who else had a chance to use the podcast rooms at ETH Denver? I thought it was an incredible addition. It got a lot of use and heard nothing but good things.
First 2 episodes of the People Talking podcast are LIVE 🎉🍾 You can find them on Spotify and soon on Apple podcasts. https://open.spotify.com/show/0KVhAV7MItkdkQ50f9lrql What is People Talking? The problem I see with a lot of web3 podcasts right now is they seem to bring on the same people to the same shows and talk about the same things. While I love a lot of these shows, I found myself getting exhausted by the highly tactical, intense, adderall-induced vibe that a lot of these shows emanate and feeling like I have to have my notes out and finger over the pause button to consume everything. Vibe-wise, what I feel is missing is some middle ground between something that's informative and educational and something that's fun and rejuvenating to listen to. At this starting point, I also noticed that a lot of the coolest people I talked to in web3 were interested in a lot of other topics. My favorite people in the space weren't just technologists or finance bros like the dominating narrative about crypto. These were people voraciously curious about economics, ecology, collective identity, probability and gambling, physics, native american history, music, skiing, charity, ego on the internet, and so much more. While some of these topics come up, web3 is always the dominating subject for all written and audio content created right now in the space. This is where People Talking comes in. This podcast is meant to create a chill, relaxed and intellectually curious space for the voraciously curious in web3 to talk about these other topics and explore the hidden connections that hugely influence their approach to web3. To follow the journey, consider following me and collecting this post (it's free). I hope you enjoy the first season of People Talking and have as much fun as I am learning about a range of topics from the coolest people in web3.
Final icon art for the People Talking Podcast! Super happy with how this turned out. First 2 episodes publishing Monday.
Artwork and branding for the @peopletalking.lens podcast is coming along. Goal is to have first 2 episodes posted before ETH Denver main events. Trying to give off a Regular Show, Adult Swim kind of vibe. What do you think?
Snippet #2 for the People Talking Podcast ❤️‍🔥 with @cryptohun3y (Steph), Head of Media at Seed Club. For those who missed the first post, People Talking is a new web3 podcast I'm launching that doesn't cover a whole lot of web3. ???? The goal is to bring on heavy hitters in the web3 space and dive deep into their pre-web3 life and topics that are adjacent to web3. By covering an eclectic range of topics that seemingly have no relation to web3, we can can start to build projects and communities that are more complete than if we only approached them from a finance or technology angle. Full length episodes will be published soon.
Hey all! Piggy-backing off a year of cohosting the Forefront podcast, I've been going through the Lens Creator Program to jump start my own podcast called People Talking. The goal of the show is to interview web3 heavy hitters to get to know the person behind the handle and discuss topics that are close to their heart outside of web3. A lot of web3 podcasts seem to be offering the same thing: the same speakers talking about the same topics and shilling the same projects. They're tactical, high octane, adderall-induced episodes that offer a lot, but are exhausting to listen to. People Talking is meant to offer a more chill environment to shill the people vs the projects and pull inspiration from unexpected places to help build a better decentralized future. Topics we’ll cover include collective identity, physics, conflict resolution, storytelling, economics, ecology, and more to come. If that sounds interesting, check out this 3 minute snippet on economics I recorded with my buddy Stefen (@stefdelev.lens and @stefdelev on Twitter) that gives a good taste of what to expect on the show. I’ll be exclusively marketing season 0 of People Talking on Lens and will eventually offer a season 0 free NFT. If you want to support the show, follow me and @peopletalking.lens to get notified for each episode and the NFT drop. Please leave comments and feedback below!
Hey all! Piggy-backing off a year of cohosting the Forefront podcast, I've been going through the Lens Creator Program to jump start my own podcast called People Talking. The goal of the show is to interview web3 heavy hitters to get to know the person behind the handle and discuss topics that are close to their heart outside of web3. A lot of web3 podcasts seem to be offering the same thing: the same speakers talking about the same topics and shilling the same projects. They're tactical, high octane, adderall-induced episodes that offer a lot, but are exhausting to listen to. People Talking is meant to offer a more chill environment to shill the people vs the projects and pull inspiration from unexpected places to help build a better decentralized future. Topics we’ll cover include collective identity, physics, conflict resolution, storytelling, economics, ecology, and more to come. If that sounds interesting, check out this 3 minute snippet on economics I recorded with my buddy Stefen (@stefdelev.lens and @stefdelev on Twitter) that gives a good taste of what to expect on the show. I’ll be exclusively marketing season 0 of People Talking on Lens and will eventually offer a season 0 free NFT. If you want to support the show, follow me and @peopletalking.lens to get notified for each episode and the NFT drop. Please leave comments and feedback below!
Web3 has come a long way, & there is a lot to be excited about in 2023. So what are the tools, products, protocols, & real-world use cases that are production-ready today? Here are 7 things to be excited about this year from the perspective of a developer of 10+ yrs. 1. Permanent storage At AWS, S3 was one of the first, most used, and useful services. Web3 storage solutions take managed storage a step further by introducing both immutability & permanence, something you can't get with traditional storage solutions. This is why companies like Instagram chose Arweave to build out features that are simply not possible through other centralized architecture. With newer protocols built on top of Arweave, like Bundlr, EXM, and Warp, the barrier to entry for users and developers has gone down drastically as it's now trivial to build high quality, performant applications on Arweave with better + easier to use APIs and gateways with improved UX. 2. Messaging One of the big value propositions of web3, as a developer, was this idea of shared data and infrastructure. Unfortunately at the time when I joined the space, April 2021, there wasn't much actually possible outside of DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and digital payments. While these are all very interesting use cases, digital payments were the only thing that might be compelling to the "average" person in the world (something I'll touch on later). Fast forward to today - one of the most exciting new protocols launched in the past year is @xmtplabs - a protocol for implementing encrypted and secure messaging. If you need messaging in your app, or maybe you just want to build a new messaging app that has some cool new features that don't exist elsewhere, you can now tap into XMTP and leverage not only a high quality service - you also inherit the users of all of the other apps that have ever built with XMTP. You no longer have to bootstrap an entirely new user base, all users across any app built with XMTP can pick up your app, sign in, and can continue their conversations from their other apps. This is already happening and gaining momentum in the @lensprotocol ecosystem and elsewhere. This value proposition that is enabled by shared, public, immutable data and infrastructure is the most powerful, underestimated, and underrated thing about web3, and the reason to be building with these tools and technologies. 3. Account abstraction (AA) Scalability, accessibility, and UX are the biggest obstacles to adoption for blockchain technologies. Account abstraction helps solve two of these challenges head on (accessibility and UX) and has quickly become one of the most prioritized features in protocol roadmaps, and popular topics in the blockchain community. Account abstraction enables features like: 1. Social, email, or arbitrary account login 2. Gasless meta-transactions 3. Batching multiple transactions 4. Gas payments in arbitrary tokens 5. Multi-signature security 6. Social recovery and more. Protocols like Fuel are being built from the ground up to treat account abstraction as a first class citizen, while specifications like EIP4337 allow existing protocols to build account abstraction into existing protocols traditionally dependent on EOAs. Biconomy has been working on tackling these challenges for years and offer an easy to use SDK and APIs to start building with right away, and whose implementation of account abstraction is based on EIP4337. With gasless transactions and cheaper and cheaper execution environments, developers and teams can start to consider treating blockchain infrastructure the same as we've been treating traditional cloud infrastructure. We can subsidize transactions which would remove the huge barrier to entry for the vast majority of the population - asking them to not only onboard the right tokens from the right exchange on the right network, they can instead just use our apps like they would any other app. 4. Better execution environments and L2s Not long ago the speed, cost, block time, and time to finality of almost all networks was so slow and expensive that most use cases were prohibited, and the UX of the existing use cases was subpar to put it mildly (compared to centralized infrastructure). Today, there are protocols that are either already being used in production or will be coming to market in the next ~6 months that provide an equal or better UX than traditional "web2" applications, made possible by sub second finality and transaction costs as low as less than $0.001. Arbitrum Nova combines the latest step in the evolution of their technology, Nitro, with a data availability committee to offer a smart tradeoff between decentralization and security that provides a compelling solution for use cases like gaming and social media applications, like Reddit who is using it for their community points system. Fuel bas built an entirely new execution environment and developer stack from the ground up, and is the fist modular execution environment. Using SwaySwap, which is built on Fuel, is already a better experience by a long shot than any traditional banking app I've ever used. (looking forward to trying it in production) https://fuellabs.github.io/swayswap/swap As a developer, having a fast and inexpensive execution environment paired with the highest quality DX I've seen in the blockchain world (including their own Rust-based language Sway, accompanied by a suite of high quality developer tools) is probably the most exciting place to be building, especially since they will be integrating not only with Ethereum but possibly other pieces of the modular stack like @celestiaorg. Polygon has so much going on it's hard to keep up, not only with the volume of quality web3 infrastructure they are shipping, but the fact that countless companies like Nike, Instagram, Starbucks, Reddit, us at @lensprotocol, and others have chosen to build there. There is a lot more happening, these are just some of the things I'm personally interested in. 5. Better abstractions If you're a developer you've no doubt heard of, or possibly used, Vercel. Vercel is wildly popular because it provides the best UX available for building and deploying web applications and features like serverless functions, which are very powerful while abstracting away the inferior UX of other cloud and managed service providers. Decentralized infrastructure like Arweave and IPFS enable some of the same functionality, but in the past the UX and DX for building was not close to what services like @vercel offer. With platforms and services like Fleek XYZ, Akord, and EXM developers can build and deploy applications and leverage storage functionality + serverless functions on these protocols without having to deal with tokens at all and instead just use an API key like they have done in the past. The value proposition is that you inherit all of the use cases of traditional infrastructure but with immutability and, with Arweave, permanence. 6. Social graphs There are ~4.9 billion social media users in the world as of today. Worldwide it is forecasted that there will be 5.85 billion social media users by 2027. Social features pop up in almost every application we use today. I joined @lensprotocol a few months after creating a tutorial video teaching developers how to build with Lens and realizing how web3 social could potentially be the key to mass adoption. Like Serverless infrastructure and managed services (like Twilio and those offered by AWS, GCP, etc..) enable developers to quickly build scalable applications without having to manage back end infrastructure, Lens Protocol provides web infrastructure for building scalable applications with social features. Instead of having to build, maintain, and iterate on their own back ends and APIs, they can instead focus on building out their web or mobile application while the Lens team continues to iterate and improve upon the back end infrastructure. In addition to that, when they launch their app on Lens they inherit the x-100s of thousands (and in the future, millions) of users and ecosystem instead of having to bootstrap everything from scratch. Combining the improved UX coming to market now with real-world use cases like social and messaging opens the door to countless opportunities for developers to build out unique and high quality experiences that literally cannot be built with centralized technologies, and importantly these are not strictly financial use cases for once. 7. Sybil resistance One of the other big challenges of building in this space has to do with sybil attack and solving sybil resistance. Multiple options for solving this now exist, most notable @gitcoin Passport and @worldcoin. There is a lot more happening that I didn't cover, but for someone with somewhat limited bandwidth these are some of the main things I'm excited about this year. 2022 was a tough year, and it's hard to predict what will happen next, but for builders there has never been a more exciting or opportune time to be in this space ✨ If you've read this far, congratulations! You can earn 1 WMATIC by simply mirroring this post to your timeline (up to 100 WMATIC), made possibly by @wav3s ⚡️
Ranking every @LensProtocol SWAG 😎🌿 Collect this post for a chance to win one of the items listed in this video!🎁 Mirror fee 20% #bytes
Ranking every @LensProtocol SWAG 😎🌿 Collect this post for a chance to win one of the items listed in this video!🎁 Mirror fee 20% #bytes
gm to all the creators out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
It seems like MMORPGs are a popular background for a lot of people in web3. What was your first MMO and what did you love most about it? Mine was Runescape. I honestly loved how much risk was involved. If I was going to commit to a master-level quest like Monkey Madness (gotta get that d scimmy), even as a risk-averse person I loved prepping and venturing out knowing I might lose everything on me.
gm It's good to be here