E15: Nic Carter on Balaji's Bet, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and the Fed's Financial Crisis

Writer, VC, and podcaster Nic Carter joins us to talk about Balaji's bet, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and the Fed's financial crisis. We record our interviews with Riverside. Go to https://bit.ly/Riverside_MoZ + use code ZEN for 20%. Check out the debut of Erik's new longform interview podcast Upstream. This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 is live now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-education-of-marc-andreessen/id1678893467?i=1000605668194 (0:00) Intro (3:00) Reflections on Balaji episode (10:00) Coinbase and SVB (14:00) Sponsors (15:00) Operation chokepoint 2.0 (16:45) We find out the reason for Antonio’s circumcision (25:00) Crypto banking crisis (36:00) How much of crypto is new? (38:40) Main benefits of crypto (47:20) Finance is politicized (55:00) Defining a CDBC (1:02:00) Nic’s biggest crypto beef (1:07:30) Nic’s take on Balaji’s bet (1:12:30) Why crypto should vote republicans next election (1:19:30) We’re in a financial crisis caused by the fed (1:20:30) Our options for addressing the crisis (1:27:00) If we were kings for a day how we’d solve it (1:28:50) Nic would rather cut rates than raise rates (1:30:00) AI is the U.S.’s main hope More shownotes and reading material released in our Substack: https://momentofzen.substack.com/ Thank you Secureframe for sponsoring (Use "Moment of Zen" for 20% discount) and Graham Bessellieu for production.