NCI: Coreweave & AI, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, Digital Assets

Coreweave & AI, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, Digital Assets.mp4

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Speaker 1 [00:00:02] All right. Welcome to the next episode of Non Consensus Investing. I'm thrilled to have Nick Carter here. Nick I don't think really needs an introduction. You know Nick I learned earlier was a philosophy major. So as I we were talking about Nietzsche and all the ulcers he had which probably led to his, kind of dark philosophy. But, you know, Nick, he's a non consensus investor, but he's invested in digital assets early, invested in I talked to he's invested in core. We were going to talk about that journey as well. He's also done this what I call like a personal transformation. If you look at like Bezos 1.0, from the late 90s, where he's, looking at a computer and that's a Bezos 2.0 who just went like full puls, put the sunglasses on, got jacked up, and, you know, Nick has has done an incredible transformation as well. And so we're going to talk about, all of that. And of course, you can. You want to, post any of your questions here. We'll do our best, you know, in the flow of the conversation to get into it. I want to start off with this clip that Nick made, leading up to a digital asset conference. I call it, like, the intimidation video. 

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Speaker 2 [00:01:15] I got to play. 

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Speaker 1 [00:01:17] So let's take a look at this thing. All right. This is called. 

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Speaker 2 [00:01:22] I feel like you're ambushing me with this right now. 

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Speaker 1 [00:01:26] This is a work of art. This is high entertainment. Okay? So I'm going to share my screen. Let's get the audio going. 

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Speaker 2 [00:01:33] You all know I've gone in bad for bitcoin. 

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Speaker 1 [00:01:35] Timing ever. 

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Speaker 2 [00:01:36] Since this, you know, news analyst, a writer, a thinker, pundit. The first show about investing. This is an investing show. Now I've got bad for bitcoin time. 

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Speaker 1 [00:01:48] The personality of the hype just. 

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Speaker 2 [00:01:50] About to a new arena on May 30th in Austin, Texas. I'm introducing you to the new Nick. Nick the fighter. 

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Speaker 1 [00:01:59] Nick. 

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Speaker 2 [00:02:04] So what are. You gonna do about it? I got you call me from California. I don't know. You got a guy in Florida? It was free. It was free. You got a free. My friend Caleb made it for free. Oh, wow. 

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Speaker 1 [00:02:27] That's. That's actually. 

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Speaker 2 [00:02:29] Very good. She's a great videographer. I just did what she said. 

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Speaker 1 [00:02:34] That was, you know, I was I was definitely looking forward to that match going into consensus. Significant intimidation video. One of, I think several. And your opponent, you know, unfortunately had an injury had about David Hoffman, also a good guy. But why don't we start there? Look, I think investing in how you conduct and live your life actually go hand in hand. You know, you need discipline. You need resilience. So how do you think about the role of boxing investing? And you know, how you approach, you know, your daily routines? 

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Speaker 2 [00:03:07] Yeah. I mean, that fight didn't happen. You know, Hoffman, he pulled out of 24 hours after the video dropped, but I don't think. He dropped by somebody. You know, I like I'm sympathetic to David. He had a broken rib, so you can't fight him. But I am fighting in, Nashville. Karate Kombat 48, on the 25th of this month. So that's that's a big that's the biggest arena karate combats ever. You know, obtained. So. I think I'll win. So come and watch me then. You have to. 

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Speaker 1 [00:03:41] Coach the mindset with winning, right? You got to. It starts in the mind. Psychology. Yeah. 

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Speaker 2 [00:03:48] Yeah. So why did I, decide to, you know, get into combat sports this year? Good question. I have always been kind of focus on fitness more so in the last kind of 2 or 3 years. And I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And I thought combat sports was probably the hardest discipline that I could do. And, obviously, very physically challenging and mentally challenging till and, as it just so happens, for some reason in crypto, there is this subplot of fighting each other, which is kind of interesting. And a couple of my friends had done it like, Luke Martin and Liam Dart have both done these boxing matches. Under the, the promotion, crypto fight night. And I was just a huge combat sports fan. Karate combat. I was familiar with them. And, you know, I saw a bit boy fight more light on karate combat, and that kind of inspired me. And I thought, why did I do this? You know, if I can find a suitable opponent and, you know, have a couple of months to train up and. You know, prove to myself, first and foremost that I can do this and then, you know, prove to, the crypto Twitter that I'm tough. Basically, that was that was the objective. And, I haven't done it yet. I mean, I haven't thought, but, I will and hopefully, you know, put on a good show and demonstrate the skills that I learned in the last few months. 

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Speaker 1 [00:05:20] So the first audience is yourself and proving to yourself, that's interesting. And then there's a secondary of, you know, I guess having some fun with crypto Twitter. Yeah, I think you yeah. 

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Speaker 2 [00:05:33] My objective is to entertain people. I mean, obviously, you know, I like to think of myself as a serious professional and all that stuff. And I have LPs and, you know, I'm a partner at a fund, and that's all very serious. But at the same time, I'm part of this game called Crypto Twitter, where you're trying to entertain people and your character in the play. And I a lot of what I do is like, you know, silly antics to entertain people, whether it's promoting tungsten cubes or hitting on seed oils or creating memes and, a fight highlight is like the ultimate meme. I mean, look at Anson. After he lost, he lost his fight. He didn't train. That almost played into his reputation in some ways. Bad boy people that almost healed his reputation. After he won his fight, people saw that he had this grit to him. They were impressed by it. So everybody's always trying to be the main character, right? 

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Speaker 1 [00:06:33] I mean, that's usually the tragic curse. If you're the main character, you want to be in the kingdom of court. 

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Speaker 2 [00:06:38] It's a poisoned chalice. You don't want to be the number one main character. You want to be like 3 to 5 in the ranking, but everybody still aspires to it. Even if once you get to the top of the mountain, it's the sword of Damocles and you know it cuts your throat. Once you get there, you still want to do it. So everybody wants to be the main character. And I thought, that's what you get. If I wanted got a cool highlight, this would go some some way towards doing that. 

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Speaker 1 [00:07:04] Right. So what's your daily training routine look like? 

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Speaker 2 [00:07:09] Well, I don't want to leak too much alpha to my opponent, but, you know, it's intense. I do a mixture of. So my primary discipline is boxing, even though the fight that I'm taking is karate. So that's more of, like, kickboxing with some grappling. So primarily I train boxing and, typically it day starts at seven, eight, 7 or 8:00 am with strength and conditioning. So basically lifting weights with a focus on muscular endurance, not hypertrophy. And then section which is kind of technical boxing with my coach or hitting the bag. Focus on endurance, mimicking fight conditions. And then I have to take calls, you know, of course, for a few hours. Right. And then around noon or midday, I'll go to the track and do sprints, because being in shape for boxing or any kind of similar sport like that, there's, like being in shape and then this fight shape and it's just levels above. And if you've ever tried to spar for a three minute round, it's so just fatiguing. It's so, so hard. It seems like your heart rate for a couple of minutes, right? Yeah. When you're when you're sparring, your heart rate's typically between 170 and 190. You have to be able to sustain that for two minutes, recover for a minute, sustain it again for two minutes, depending on how many rounds you're fighting. And sprints are the best way, I think, to prepare for that on the cardio side. And so that's the hardest session of the day. And I have to like say a little prayer before I go and do that and like read my affirmations because I get so intimidated by the idea of doing a, you know, 400 meter sprints, back to back or something like that. And then the last session of the day will be typically seven and 9 p.m., something like that after work. And it's sparring most days, at the gym with, with the other guys in the gym. And that's also hard, but it's more fun. So you kind of forget about how painful it is. 

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Speaker 1 [00:09:17] Right. Well, I mean, it sounds like the training's painful too. And how are you hold yourself accountable to your training regime? 

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Speaker 2 [00:09:25] Well, I have actually a number of coaches, but my primary coach will yell at me if I don't show up. So in my first camp, I don't think I missed a day. I don't think I missed a workout. I didn't miss a day. And so typically it's six days a week and 3 to 4 sessions today, and then I get a rest day and my second camp, obviously I have to travel occasionally. So, but yeah, I just commit to it. And, you know, I think about the fight and the fact that my opponent's training is harder, maybe not quite as hard, but still training and they're dangerous opponent. And I think about the fact that you're performing on a card in front of. Thousands of people, potentially tens of thousands in person, and then hundreds of thousands on the stream. And everybody the, you know, professionally, everyone on crypto Twitter will be watching it. Maybe after the factor, they'll see a highlight. So. You know, it's. That's very motivating. You don't want to show up and look fast or look slow, you know, want to look bad. And so it doesn't take that much to show up every day and do it. I also take a lot of pre-workout. So. 

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Speaker 1 [00:10:36] Interesting. So I guess a couple of things are. One is you have a coach that helps hold you accountable. I think there's a lot to be said for that. You know, I having someone else that you can share your goals with that can call you out. I think it's very powerful. I agree, you know, I do CrossFit and, you know, you also don't want to let other people down that expect to see you there in the morning. At the same time, there's a camaraderie that's a part of it. And the other part you mentioned is, you know, fear of failure. And you channel that into motivation. Some people will just not even attempt it. Right. Public speaking is considered one of the most mortifying tasks anyone can do, let alone. Fighting someone else in public for the first time in a livestream to 10,000 people or more. So how did you, you know, taking a step back and then we'll transition to investing and core. We've an I, mixed written a lot about all these topics, and there's a lot to unpack there, but how did you go from, you know, philosophy student to, you know, fighter, investor, AI, digital assets. What did that journey look like? 

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Speaker 2 [00:11:43] Yeah. I mean, I think philosophy actually, is a good base for investing. It's a good base for a lot of things, actually, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I did philosophy because I enjoyed it. And, you know, it teaches you to be inquisitive and to think, you know, very critically and, think very deliberately. And that's kind of what the role of an investor is to be curious and to investigate things, and to get totally absorbed by, you know, niche topics. So I worked as a journalist for two years after college, actually, and, which I also think is a good base for what kind of. 

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Speaker 1 [00:12:24] What beat or beat were you on or. Yeah, it. 

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Speaker 2 [00:12:27] Was the most it was the dullest beat in the world, which is corporate law. So like. 

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Speaker 1 [00:12:34] That sounds pretty dry. 

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Speaker 2 [00:12:35] It was extremely dry. And so I quit that because I was obsessed with Bitcoin. This is 2016. And I thought to myself, well, all I want to do is work in Bitcoin and I didn't there wasn't like a big bitcoin industry at the time. And so I stalled. I went to business school for a year and during that time started writing and publishing. My thoughts on Bitcoin I thought was really it, that was the only game in town, at the time. And through a series of lucky coincidences and, some mentors that happened to believe in me, I ended up at fidelity on their crypto team. They were starting out this proprietary fund under basically, fidelity has their, family office kind of account to fund their, focusing on investing in digital assets more as a learning opportunity than anything to understand how to operationalize fun like that. To how to build the back end infrastructure of the back office, and also because the leadership wanted exposure. And, so actually, Chris Bronski was someone I met. I met him in Ark Invest, when I was still in school. And, Kathy and Chris invited me in to one of their sessions. So I, you know, took the bus up to New York and went and met them and talked about crypto. And then I wrote my, my dissertation on the governance of digital assets in, 2016, 2017, which was a very revealing, experience actually made me very bearish on most tokens. And I thought that they the governance, even if there was some claimed model of governance, was very poor, but also made me very excited about the kind of leaderless, decentralized governance that projects like Bitcoin have. And then I posted that on Twitter and people found it and started talking about it. And, I posted a lot of medium blogs, and I'd also started this project called Coinmetrics when I was in business school. Is a data project just aggregating crypto data and publishing it for free for anyone to use. And I started seeing the data in like sell side reports on the street, which was kind of funny to me because it was like one student's data project and I started seeing it and like Goldman Sachs sell side reports and stuff like that, which was was very validating. And through all that, I ended up at fidelity at this fund, which is the fund today is called Avon. So I was the the predecessor version of that. And after about a year of doing that, my then boss Matt Walsh suggested that we strike out and start our own firm. And, again, you know, we were pretty green. At least I was. And so we were lucky enough that, you know, a few folks who were willing to take a bet on us and back a first time fund focusing on the venture side in the crypto space. And that was Castle Island Fund one, which you raised in 2018. And now we're, or deploying fund three. So it's gone. Well, it's been a great kind of 6 or 7 years there. 

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Speaker 1 [00:15:49] Right. Coinmetrics a venture backed company. I think Goldman's an investor there. I won't hold that against you here, but, yeah. And Castle has got a great podcast and a number of venture funds. Definitely worth, worth a listen to. And it's interesting because you and Matt straddle this trad fi world and crypto world. You see both sides of it, right? Fidelity, of course, is one of the leading investment institutions, highly trusted brand, also highly centralized player, but also at the vanguard of of innovation. So I think I think you've got an interesting, seat there. You know, you also. You know, when you were, kind of identified with Bitcoin, you also had a I guess I know what you want to call, like a rupture with the community. Do you want to walk through that, how you dealt with that? And you know what? What did that mean to be like a public figure where everything you say is scrutinized and, you know, you got trolls coming at you left and right, and how did how did you deal with that? 

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Speaker 2 [00:16:47] Yeah. It's like the quintessential problem of the modern world is becoming captive to a certain community. And the way the social media set up, it really encourages this, which is once you develop a certain brand, then you are encouraged to only produce content which affirms the views of the community that has developed around you. And for me, that was Bitcoin and specifically being a Bitcoin maximalist. And I never thought of myself that way. I mean, I was interested in all sorts of projects. I was interested in the theorem when it came out. All number of things. You know, I think blockchains are more than just, a first store of value. I think there's all kinds of interesting things you can do with them. But on on sort of the Twitter side, people thought of me as exclusively Bitcoin person, and I realized that I was risking becoming Flanders ized, basically becoming a parody of myself by just creating content that appealed to this specific community. And it is weird, like you're trying to please the algorithm, God, like you're trying to create offerings to appease the specific algorithm. And it is dehumanizing because you lose your own personhood, and all you're trying to do is create content that specifically does well and performs well with their community. 

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Speaker 1 [00:18:11] The dopamine machine is there. Is that so? 

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