[Music] people will obviously only share their wins on social media if you really get it right you could make a lot of money but odds are really good that you're going to be the exity what you need is for the market to punch you in the face in my case several times it looked so easy I want to make as much money as
fast as possible too those early people who gave Ponzi money they weren't lying look at all the money I'm making buying is not hard selling is hard selling is really really really really hard you know what you're looking at here you are looking at the original Bitcoin either be completely passive don't try to time the market treat it
like passive Index Fund investing or go 100% Allin well hello everyone it's jimo shasy with yet another infinite loops I am very excited by today's guest my guest today is Nat Eliason the author of crypto confidential winning and losing millions in the New Frontier of Finance kirkus reviews already your book doesn't
even come out until July and yet you already have a circus review calling your book an essential read for anyone playing or thinking of playing in the crypto sandbox Natt welcome thank you so much Jim yeah I that that circus review was amazing I I couldn't believe that that came through already and was so positive they can be pretty tough
critics very very very tough critics and that's why I pay attention to them because if they're saying something good about a book I'll usually at least check it out right so when when when I saw that I was like now you had very kindly sent me the uh preprint of your book which I read which I loved which I suggest everyone get a copy of when it's
available in July and and we were talking before we uh started the recording uh one of the things that I love about the way you write this book we have verticals in film and in we have our own book publishing company it's kind of still in stealth mode although we're horrible at stealth so everybody knows about it but
in in reading the scripts and reading books if you can engage your reader it from the very first page that's a really good sign that the book's going to be great and I love how you did it you could did it with the line Nat someone found a way to hack us it sounds bad all our funds might be at risk like how do
you not keep reading yeah well thank you that was you know crypto is this kind of like opaque and confusing and intimidating in Industry especially from the outside and I you know I I I love the industry I'm fascinated by it I think it's so cool and I really really wanted to write something that could demystify some of
it could explain some of the things going on could sort out the good and bad and I decided pretty early on that the best way to do that would not be a crypto 101 what is bitcoin type book because it's just such a narrower Market whereas you know and if it's a little drier you have to yourself through it but if you if I could write something
really really fun and really fast-paced that could almost be like a beach read then and then like sneak the crypto knowledge in along the way that might actually achieve the goal of you know getting more of this knowledge out there but in in this really really fun package so uh figuring out how to make it
exciting like that was the huge Focus throughout the process yeah and a and a great way to bring your reader in what for many is a very opaque topic right um way back when my son uh decided to do a deep dive he he has the invest like the best uh podcast which I always call him the podcast King I'm just you know one
of the one of the retainers uh but he did uh a he did a series on crypto and I listened to it and so that I was sitting with him this is way back in 20 16 or 17 and so I'm I'm sitting with him and and I'm like all right we got 30 minutes explain crypto to me and he looks at me and he goes I can't in 30 minutes yes it's
really hard you you could you can maybe get through you know like Bitcoin and some of the basics of the the value prop with Bitcoin and and potentially ethereum but you it's it's hard I mean I've been wrting about it for two years on this and I still struggle to give pretty concise explanations for things yeah and he he did actually use those 30
minutes uh to good effect well set let's set up our listeners and people watching uh your your own story started when you learned that uh the first of your two daughters was on the way and that you needed uh to make as much money as you possibly could within a six-month time frame uh you know from an old Wall
Street can try to make money really fast usually leads to uh despair but usually leads to pain but if you don't mind set set up the story for our listeners yeah that time period I think was so wild and so special and I think it's a time period that a lot of us are going to look back on with curiosity and interest not just
because crypto but because it was the end of 2020 going into 2021 we were starting to come out of the pandemic there was all of this uncertainty but also excitement around being alive and then coming out of this world and the there was all of these stimulus checks coming out and the economy was starting
to rip and then on top of all of this you have crypto just starting to go parabolic it it really began to take off in November December of 2020 and started to hit Main exem awareness in early 2021 that's when Bitcoin was hitting new highs Elon was on SNL talking about Dogecoin you had all these big media events happening be sold his 5,000 days
nft for $69 million right it's just these wild unimaginable events happening and I'm in this funny position where you know I I felt like I needed to make as much money as quickly as possible I was scared with having a kid coming and I didn't know what life was going to on the other side of that I wasn't really
making an income but I had savings I could fall back on but obviously those can only last for so long and I had been learning programming because I thought okay I enjoyed programming it's fun it can get me to a good income faster than writing can and maybe I'll find a job there and then I just keep seeing this
crypto stuff hitting my social media feed and people that I knew from other lives like the entrepreneurial World especially posting about nfts and weird coins and all this money they're making and I just couldn't ignore the Allure it looked so easy it looked like everybody was making money and I was just in that
heads space of I want to make as much money as fast as possible too it seems like people are doing it in crypto I'm going to go figure it out and try to make it happen and uh you know what's funny about that is that is the way a lot of bubbles get started if you know your history uh you share you you you share a
lot of enthusiasm with a fellow named Isaac Newton who lost his entire his entire fortune in a scheme called the souy trading Bumble uh bubble and and we're gon to get to it a little bit later because what's interesting is if you study these various schemes bubbles Etc where everybody gets whipped up and ridiculously enthusiastic I myself lived
through one with the dot uh bomb uh bubble uh but they they share a lot of uh characteristics but before we go there let's talk about kind of your first big moment and you decide okay uh I'm a reasonably good programmer um and I could probably make some money in D5 farming but you didn't really like D5
farming tell us why yes so one of the things that I learned really quickly and that I I caution people about pretty aggressively is people will obviously only share their wins on social media it's pretty rare that they're sharing their losses and so once you get into some of these really really speculative Manas in crypto or anywhere
else you find out that tons of people are also losing money and even the people who appear to be making lots of money might actually be down but they're just posting their wins and back then farming was kind of the big thing which was in the good version it was getting paid some tokens from a project for participating in it and using it
exploring it kind of like getting free Uber Eats credits for signing up for Uber Eats right that that was the good version of it and that that version still exists and it's you know farming itself is not necessarily bad but then there was the really casinoes gambling version where new project would get spun
up the more money you temporarily placed in it the more tokens you got the more of those tokens you redeposited the even more tokens you got it was like a multiplier effect and so it kind of became this game of chicken of how long can we all hold these tokens in this thing so the value of them runs up because nobody's selling and then the
first big perc of selles starts the Cascade downwards then everyone's selling and trying to get out as quickly as possible uh and then NE you know the next day you move on to the next thing and you would see these these little crypto apps pop up specifically for this gambling farming activity and overnight
they would have a hundred million put into them which was insane and then two days later there'd be less than 10 million in it and the 100 million plus would be in some other app and it was just moving around like crazy but it became really clear that if you were not the person if you're not one of the people in these secret very
well protected group chats or Discord groups where you knew something where you knew it was going to launch as soon as it launched so you could get in early before the price ran up then you were basically what's called exit liquidity you were the money that was coming in later as the price had run up trying to
get your share of the winnings but you were buying from the people who got in really early so you were giving them the money that allowed them to make money off of the whole game and you know that's that's kind of like being the fish and poker or these other things you know it's not necessarily exactly like a Ponzi scheme a lot of it is but there's
a lot of things you could analogize it to and so what I learned pretty quickly was playing these speculation games then it was farming today it's meme coins right there's all these crazy meme coins coming out on like salana maybe it'll be on bass in a few months but playing those speculative games if you if you
really get it right you could make a lot of money but odds are really good that you're going to be the exit liquidity and so the vast majority of people are losing money they're seeing something on Twitter they're getting excited they're going in they're throwing their money in they're losing all of it and then
they're going home and so I didn't want to play that game anymore I didn't want to play a game where I had a chance of significant loss I only wanted to do things where I if I lost it would be a small loss and if I won it could be really big win and so that's what kind of eventually drove me away from some of
the really speculative stuff and more onto the like well let's actually try to help build something real here because that's where the real long-term opportunity is and I mean that's true in basically any industry as one who spent his entire career for the most part in asset management and love history like as I was reading your book it was just
like I was making notes on on the Kindle but I was also I also had a notebook in front of me because like it just shared so many similarities with uh things that have already happened right like yeah I think it was Cicero who said if you are ignorant of what happened before you were were born you are destined to
remain forever a child and like in the early part of the 20th century there was a very similar thing on Wall Street which was called investment pools and what they would do is exactly what they did with the pump and dump in crypto they would accumulate huge positions in stocks then they would start broadcasting that this stock was going
to the moon and everybody on Wall Street and everybody in the bucket shops became their exit liquidity so what's really interesting same sort thing in most of these schemes where they get in with in the case of Wall Street they get in with big positions in these stocks by the way many of the stocks they got into were
highly IL liquid another feature another big topic another another feature that Maps pretty well over to crypto but then they would you know Joseph Kennedy who was also a bootlegger was also a very well-known uh uh operator of stock pools um and in fact the behavior of these stock pools is what gave us the
SEC um so what's really interesting is this sort of pattern B uh happens over and over and over again people notice like the SEC Etc uh and then the regulation comes in often times as a result of all the Misadventures of what had had gone uh pre gone on previously um but one of the things that I find interesting about your book as
well is you did feel a real strong social pressure even though you were in some of those private chat rooms you felt a very very strong social pressure not to sell with wi without the benefit of hindsight uh uh bias or analysis here did did you kind of know that wait a minute are these guys trying to make me
their exit liquidity you know that was sort of the the unfortunate reality of having such a transparent Financial world because you could you could work on a project you could be an employee you could be a founder and you could get paid in that project's tokens and not get paid any other way but if people knew that that was your your wallet your
crypto wallet that all those tokens were yours and then they saw you selling they would they could get really upset and this became an increasingly big problem as I stayed in crypto longer because you know I most people knew which wallet was mine and so they would see cells of the token of the project I was working with
and then they would uh you know they would message me or they would message other people on the team and they would say you know what's he doing like what does he know what's going on and it it created these awful incentives because if if you're just getting paid in the Project's token you have to sell it you
know you you you can't pay your mortgage with Doge or or with most of these things especially these new tokens for these new products that are just launched so you have to cash it out eventually but the minute you do everyone sees it or not everyone a lot of people see it as a lack of faith in the project you're a scammer something
you know that they don't it it's these really really challenging incentives and I I didn't get to include this in the book but I talked with a number of friends who worked in the industry during that period who were up millions of dollars on paper but they were so afraid of the social backlash of selling
any of their tokens that they didn't sell them and basically rode them back down to zero because of that pressure and you know I I got kind of stuck in that and I I wasn't sure what to do and the the thing that I ended up settling on was actually partially based on SEC insider trading laws which was you CEOs
and Senior Executives of public companies have to sell on a schedule right it has to be kind of predictable when they're going to sell so that they can't act on inside information and so I I created this rule for myself that I'm going to sell basically a set amount each day and that percentage might change every couple weeks or months or
something but every day at around the same time I would just sell that amount so that it would be very predictable personally and publicly and that seemed like the best way to balance it but even that you know turned into all this mess with uh people getting really pissed at me and it you know there just wasn't a
good answer you either wrote it all down to zero you sold it and had people be mad at you or I mean or you were Anonymous and this is honestly why I think a lot of people are Anonymous or pseudonymous in crypto is if you start one of these big projects and it takes off you might suddenly be sitting on tens of millions of dollars and if they
know who it is that has those tokens and exactly where they are they will watch them I had one friend who was an nft Trader and there were these Discord chats that had automated alerts set up for everything he did and so if he bought something they all got no ifications on their phones that this guy had bought something if he
sold they would get notifications that he had sold and then there would be even more technical people who would try to front run transactions from these really uh influential people it's just it's really crazy the the social incentives you get into when your whole financial life is public like that yeah there's a a great handbook by
a guy by the name of cheli called influence and wonderful book he highlights all of the methods W which make it very very difficult for people not to comply uh like uh reciprocity is one of the strongest like if I do something for you you feel overwhelmingly unless you're a psychopath or sociopath that you need to
do something for me as well it's baked into our human OS um but also the this whole idea of what I think uh uh Scott Adams the cartoonist called linguistic kill shots um and that is this idea of you either have Diamond hands or paper hands yeah did you did you experience a lot of that that mean I I went into crypto much more on the yeah
we all got to have Diamond hands just hold this forever because if if we all hold it'll keep going up and the that that mentality was so baked into like you said the operating system of most people in the space and the longer I spent in it the more I realized that that mentality is almost like a it's
almost like a little it's a way to get other people to be your act of liquidity because the the the way to have them the way to have the best outcome is to portray yourself as having Diamond hands that that we're all in this together we're all going to hold until the moon so that everybody else gets convinced of it so that none of them
sell so that you can sell and obviously you know I that's maybe a more cynical and negative version of it but it's kind of like the the game theory way you have to think about it which is that these big influential people who are telling everyone to just keep holding just keep holding just keep holding they might be
saying that so that they can sell and you end up being the one holding the bag and this idea that paper hands somebody who sells is like a you know weak feebleminded quitter you know somebody who should be disgraced and then uh embarrass for their actions like no no no no no that's probably the smart thing to do if you
bought something for ,000 and now it's worth $50,000 you're not stupid for selling that that's probably a really good decision but there were so many cases of this of just and myself included being committed to that idea and just watching something run way up and then run all the way back down and honestly that was
a little bit of what I wanted to capture in this too because as I talked to other people who were really involved in crypto during that period a lot of people have these stories and a lot of people experienced getting into something at the right time seeing it go up a crazy amount and then riding it all the way back down and there's a lot of Shame and
embarrassment that comes with that especially if you like I did told your partner at one point hey we're up $100,000 on this this is amazing and then they go oh great and then two months later they say hey where did that $100,000 go and you have to say well it wasn't $100,000 in our bank account and that's it's uh it's a pretty
painful thing and I I know it especially in relationships led to a lot of drama during that period uh myself included and I I think it's important people to be honest about some of the psychological games that could be happening with those memes when they get you know when they really really start
to spread and really really start to take hold yeah there are things called ER patterns which are the elemental pattern of things that might look very very different but are really the same and so an ear pattern for this type of speculative boom and bust uh is very memetic right so we copy other people it's in the source code of our
DNA we have mirror neurons like there it we were meant to because copying other people is a really great way to learn how to do things fast right what just think of the child who watches mom and dad doing this this and this and they copy them and that helps them learn really quickly but it also it involves a
part of our psychology that is very easy to hijack and the way you the way you could hijack it much like those guys who ran the pools much like people saying ah you've got paper hands is it involves uh the emotional side of our nature vastly more than it does um the uh more analytical side but like there's an old
saying on Wall Street and uh it happened to me in options trading that the worst thing that happened to a novice investor was for them to make a big amount of money on their first trade because that you've got it all figured out now you're a genius are Wy Coyote genius yep yep and having experienced it I can tell you the the the feelings that that
engenders are so difficult to overcome now generally speaking you know what did Mike Tyson say Everybody's Got A Plan until they get punched in the face what you need is for the market to punch you in the face in my case several times uh and indeed in yours because you did have a Moment of clarity where you were like
this is crazy I've gotta I I've gotta yeah I've got to get out but then back to Newton he did the same if you know this history because everyone else was buying the south sea Newton bought it himself and he sold when it was here listeners are not going to see I'm I'm doing a parabolic up with my hand yeah yeah it
sold here and then it kept growing up and then what is that in gender I've made a mistake mistake I was wrong and he jumped back in with the conviction come H or I water I'm hanging out out of this stock and and I used to make a joke that during that time pre- internet obviously uh but poems were were really
popular then and there was actually a poem about the sou SE Trading Company that went uh fill the south sea goblet full the god Gods sh of our stock take care Europa pleased accepts the bull and job with joy puts off the bear and now I was a Quant and when I was asset manager and so I used to use that as the joke to
say I'm a quat but anytime somebody writes a poem about a stock I hold I'm selling it doesn't matter yeah that's that that's like a that's another great history repeating itself example like I I think about this a lot now where there were these little looking back the best signs about when to get out were all little social things
they were never the number itself they were behavior-based right like like writing a poem I I texted somebody this the other day because I'm sure you saw the the photo of uh Jensen Hong the Nvidia CEO signing the woman's chest at the conference and I texted that photo to something and I said this is this is where you
sell and you know I I I I'm betting I'm betting against Nvidia by saying that and we'll see how that comment airs but I was just thinking back to crypto and it was always when people started behaving in these really ridiculous ways or something had gone completely or there something really really strange and uncharacteristic had happened uh
like you if when it was in all the news all the celebrities were buying Bor apes or uh you know Elon on SNL talking about Dogecoin it was always those kinds of things that were the sign that we had hit Peak speculation right U Morgan howel has that wonderful quotation from psychology of money where he says the
the sign you're in a bubble is when most of the buyers are buying for speculation instead of long-term investment some something to that effect and I think you do see that best in the behavior of people more than the the actual numbers or the actual uh quantitative aspects um but it's I it was it was so hard to
believe it at the time because I was so wrapped up in it too you know like you said I was I was just like Newton I would I would have these wins and then I would get out of something and then it would keep going up and I would get back in with even more right and whatever I made I ended up in in almost every case
except for a couple of big ones I ended up losing most of what I put in even if it if it went way up because I would do that same thing you know I would just get sucked up I would ignore the social signs that some was weird here and double down and then lose what I had made and that and that happened to a lot of people who you think made a lot of
money in crypto during that period there you you saw these these Twitter posts I I can't name names but you would see these Twitter posts and things about these huge wins and then I would I would talk to them months months later and they'd say oh yeah you know I made that amount there but then I put that amount
times two into this other thing and then that just went down to zero so it ended up being a wash and th those are the St that don't get out quite as much no and I I think that's a great part of your book uh educating people along those lines I am fascinated for by it because the the poll on your emotions which I
experience so I'll give you an example um in April of 1999 the doc bubble was going bull I wrote a piece for my then company Osan capital management that said uh the internet contrarian and in the piece I go through all of the reasons why we are this is the biggest bubble any of us currently investing have ever experienced 80% of
these companies are going to be carried out of here feat first they're going to go bankrupt and then what did I do Natt what do you think I did next you you put a bunch of money into internet stocks no even worse I started an internet company I I don't know maybe that's better right but but but what's fascinating
about it is like I my entire investment process was completely empirically derived quantitative algorithmic investing for longer periods of time right but it was basically you know I I I was pure Vulcan right it was like don't tell me stories we're only going to look at the numbers yeah but then when you actually experience the
emotional pull of something like that that's where because I had that experience and I started seeing it again in crypto previous to that in the whole CDO Madness that caused the uh great financial uh downturn um it's very difficult to extract yourself from those emotions especially in your case a couple of things happen where like I
don't even know how you managed to get where you got in terms of being able to pull the trigger itself so for example you bought a board eight for like7 and5 thousand and unlike many many other people you actually sold it for about 198,000 yeah uh U US Dollars and then you also had an experience where you
bought some uh of the you saw 2.0 and and you bought uh I guess it was Luna uh was that yeah and you you you you made like 60 Grand in a day what what people don't understand is when that is happening to you in real time you you become just absolutely tunnel visioned and you're like oh my God I I'm I'm gonna be a billionaire
yeah I'm a genius genius and and and one of the things that I learned uh through getting punched in the face a lot of times by the market was any active manager and doesn't really matter by the way what you're trading any active manager follows a a sine wave and it goes from hero genius goat idiot hero genius goat
idiot and once you once you bake that into your process there are a lot I mean like literally I had built in all sorts of things to keep my emotions at Bay but as I was watching the whole crypto thing unfold uh and the nft thing unfold I just kept thinking oh my God like this is just so close to every bubble I've
ever I've ever studied lots of people are gonna like lose a lot of money here yeah but but let's let's every me like in H everybody knows that right or most people know that um but the there are some reasonably good real projects going on in crypto and ethereum Etc and and one of the things that I find really interesting is crypto isn't
dead the the United States government which usually at the federal level gets What It Wants yeah has tried to kill crypto in a variety of ways they would come right out like FDR when he banned gold and he literally sent treasury agents to people's homes to take the gold away from them uh so it has kind of
an antifragile nature talk a bit about why that part of crypto everybody like this this human drama is really really fascinating but Underneath It is Well like underneath the SC stock pools guess what they G they gave rise to mutual funds where which were trying to pump and D yeah yeah right and and which train people wow maybe if I just keep
putting my little bit of money in every month and just hold it I could save for my retirement and you know created a massive injur uh industry what parts do you find that are still really compelling from just a use case point of view totally and yeah I I felt like this was so important to talk about and to
highlight too because there it's like you said there's a lot of dog in crypto like by by number of tokens probably 99% of them are just copycats or really short-term things or you know darling need to be there but then you do have this core of very legitimate very fascinating Financial tools that I feel like I can pretty confident say are
going to be a significant part of the world economy moving forward even if it's just a couple of them right and Bitcoin obviously has really really crossed over here where we have the ETF now you you have black rock saying they want to own 15% of all Bitcoin you have uh you can put it in your retirement account you have these these companies
putting it as part of their treasury it's it has actually succeeded at creating a digital analog for gold and I think it the the technical properties of it that allow for that are wonderful you know we can't totally get into them here but the the the the fixed quantity the you know decreasing inflation rate the
very very fast Global transmitt ability it it really makes it this wonderful tool for being a an international store of wealth almost like an improved gold and that that story alone has carried a lot of crypto through these booms and busts and you know that it's one of those things where gold you you have some of these other
uses right it's a wonderful conductor you can use it in jewelry um but a lot of it is still mtic right it's we all agreed that this rock is valuable and because we all agree that this rock is valuable this rock is valuable and you you know you could say that about any rock or anything with a finite quantity
and people said it about Bitcoin and just as more and more people agreed on it and started to treat it that way it sort of became true it willed itself into Effectiveness and I think that you know the US was kind of stuck in this challenging position of you know the SEC doesn't want people to get scammed and that's that's a really important job and
the US doesn't want to lose its status as a GL Global Reserve currency as the the thing that people do business in but I think that as as Bitcoin in particular has caught on and and we're really seeing this in in uh in Congress in the last few weeks especially there's been this really quick change of we should
actually welcome this because a lot of innovation is going to happen here in finance and in technology it's going to happen all over the world because it's a global phenomenon especially in places that are subject to high inflation or whatnot and so we we should welcome this and try to focus on you know supporting
the good parts of it because a a global easily transmittable store of value is actually a wonderful thing for the world economy right like so much of innovation has happened by making uh money easier to transmit between people easier to verify uh it's good for everybody if we have more trade if we can move money
around easier and then you've got the ethereum story which was kind of like the next big thing after Bitcoin where I heard this wonderful analogy from the bankless guys recently where you could think of Bitcoin as a giant spreadsheet where you can track where every single the Bitcoin and fraction of Bitcoin is you can track every person on the
network and you can say who has what and you know with basically 100% certainty that it's always going to be accurate and it's not going to be cheat so you've got this like wonderful spreadsheet but it's a simple spreadsheet and that's a good thing for Bitcoin we don't want it to be complicated we want to know who
has how much and that's it and then ethereum said okay we're going to take that spreadsheet and now we're going to add macros we're going to add code we're going to say it's not just that you can send your tokens your coins between each other your eth or whatever else but we can also do automated things with it and
so now you have this opportunity to rebuild the modern Financial system on a on a internet first tech layer instead of what we have in the US right now which is kind of this pretty old system right like a lot of it came up from paper ledgers and it's been adjusted as we go and you've got holdovers from that
like having wire transfer fees and a delays not to mention credit card processing fees and kind of like slowness whereas kind of starting from scratch rebuilding the financial layer on something like ethereum allows you to have instant fast payments all over the world in effectively US dollars or getting your paycheck every minute
instead of every two weeks uh being able to instantly borrow against your assets without having to go through hours of paperwork and deal with lawyers and Banks and all these things and it's going to take a long time before that becomes mainstream but it's already really quite impressive how useful it can be you know I'll tell one story I
had this ridiculous event happen last fall where uh Austin has kind of crazy weather storms sometimes and we had a one in 100y year hail storm that happened last fall and both of my cars were parked outside and they both got total so I wake up the next morning you know I hear the hail coming down it sounds like we're in a tornado or
something it was actually really scary uh cuz we have a tin roof to a metal roof and so it sounds like we're being bombarded and then I go out the next morning both of the windshields on both of my cars are destroyed they're full of water there's glass like both of my children's car seats are full of glass
right it's just awful and then I'm having to deal with insurance which is a three-month process to get the money I needed to fully replace these cars so we're dealing with rentals and all this all this nonsense and we finally get to the Finish Line where we're going to get the check for the car but it's getting delayed they're
having issues on State Farms and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm just sick of paying rental fees that I shouldn't be having to pay because of their delays and so literally in 10 minutes I went to my ethereum wallet I borrowed like $25,000 or something against my ethereum it was in
my Chase bank account an hour later I went to the dealership I got the new car and then once the State Farm money came through I just repaid it and that ability to just really quickly borrow against your assets for effectively no fee no Bank paperwork you know I didn't have to go set up a A helck or a portfolio line of credit or anything
like that that's really cool and that's something that's available to everyone in the world 247 that was not possible five years ago and obviously there's a lot of bad things that can happen if you can instantly leverage your assets to go do silly stuff with but the the ability to kind of subvert or you know Skip parts
of the earn banking system is really really cool especially if you don't live in the US and you're subject to you know concerning banking practices your money might disappear or you have hyperinflation the fact that you can just take your paycheck turn it into usdc which is fully backed by US dollars and then have it in one of these crypto
native savings accounts where you're earning the treasury rate even though you live in a small town in Nigeria is incredible like that's so cool that that wasn't possible five years ago and I think that a lot of people in the US at government level woke up and said this is actually the best thing in the world
for the American economy and the US dollar because it's still what people wanted to nominate in and they're going to do it using this new tech because they can't access our banking system internationally but this opens it up to everybody in the world to have the same protections and stability that we all
get to enjoy living here I mean that alone is so amazing without getting into you know what could happen with nfts and what could happen with other defi stuff like those things are amazing and are only getting cooler and cooler as time goes on yeah an interesting thing about Innovations is um that they a lot of
people swarm to them uh doesn't have to be Financial necessarily for example at the turn of the 20th century there were more than 200 automobile manufacturers in the United States and everybody was trying a different way to do it and then we ended up with two I guess we got one now and and but I've always kind of
thought of money as both a technology and an information system basically and if you think if you think about money that way it is is brilliant right to have a way to conveniently trade a slip of paper or a code of digits or whatever for something that you want right it's a it's a a means of getting of it's an advanced
form of barter really yeah we don't have to meet face to face I don't have to see that uh I'll give you these three chickens for those three books behind you um and it makes economies much much more efficient and part of the hack is you've got to get consensus reality on board and by that I mean if like you have maybe a core group of innovative
thinkers and everything and they're like we've got this really great idea and then consens everyone else is kind of like I those guys are really crazy over there yeah it's hard right but it seeps into consensus reality and and that is when you reach the Tipping Point right and the Tipping Point in my opinion is when
you see people doing exactly what you said uh switching it out uh using it as a means of affecting an economic transfer and I think that one of the things that tricked people up in crypto was currencies are supposed to have or supposed to be a store of value right so like I I have uh $10,000 and that is like that's latent
energy over here right and and if it changes too much if it if if it was 10,000 today and is 2,000 tomorrow and 20,000 the next day that's not going to be a great uh way to means of exchange yeah so one of the things that I would do if like I was a crypto guy I I I would I would be quite willing to separate the use cases and say hey great
speculative V vehicle over here on the one hand but also then go into what you said about people transferring they that don't have access to their uh uh financials if they're outside of the US do what you did um but is that happening are are people trying to yeah that that I mean actually that that's such an important point
because it shows what has been a really wonderful evolution in the crypto story because if you read the original Bitcoin white paper it the title is actually like Bitcoin on electronic peer-to-peer payment system it's something like that where the original stated goal of Bitcoin was to replace dollars or was to
be like digital currency and you said something really interesting there where you said a currency is supposed to be a store of value and I think some people would disagree with that because some would say no you want a hard money like gold to be your store of value or land or something like that and then currency
is like a temporary means of exchange but it maybe shouldn't be the thing that you keep as your store of value because it could be inflated away because of these other concerns and then you know with Bitcoin it could Bitcoin couldn't be a store of value because it was crazy volatile right you don't want to put your savings into something at $60,000
and then watch it go down to 12 that's not going to feel very good and so yeah as as Bitcoin has had these runs up and ethereum has had these runs we've had the emergence of this other asset stable coins which are you know crypto tokens that are pegged to $1 uh usually you know in the best case in a bank account
somewhere and that separation has been fantastic because if you're actually paying for things day-to- day you don't want to use Bitcoin it it's going to be slower it's going to be more expensive you're going to have the volatility like that's the the long-term savings but now you have this new thing this usdc that's
pegged to the dollar it's always going to be $1 and then you can do all of your payments with that and not have to touch your safe long-term Bitcoin and while Bitcoin is definitely not a great store of value in the way land or gold might be right now because those things have much more predictable uh not predictable but more contained
volatility Bitcoin is trending towards less volatility as it gains adoption it sort of has this this logarithmic curve of how the price is settling out and the volatility with each cycle has tightened the amount that it goes up has decreased the amount that it goes down has like somewhat decreased uh and so it's it's
coming into this tighter curve where you could imagine that in 50 years it has something closer to Gold's stability we're just not there yet right and so I do think it's a really long term for it to get to that point but in the meantime you do have this thing you you do have these stable coins that can let you have
the benefits of currency without all that crazy volatility and the thing that's amazing about stable coins just going into kind of the power of this new Financial layer is you know I suspect that in three to five years there will be a lot of places where you can do Apple pay using stable coins from your
coinbase wallet the way you can do it with your credit card right now and within my coinbase wallet within about 10 seconds I can swap my usdc for a treasury based stable coin and then I'm getting the treasury yield in my checking account without having to transfer between you know different bank accounts and things like that and that's
a really cool like new way to me for me to use my money and to also protect against some amount of inflation and again for everyone in the world to use it and and that's really neat and so I think that it crypto is doing a good job of growing and saying okay this is still kind of a speculative asset it's not at
the stability point where it's a great store of wealth it'll probably get there eventually but in the meantime if you do want something more reliable you have this other asset over here of course then you have to be careful that you don't put your money in the wrong stable coin because we've seen those blow up
catastrophically and that was really the the worst outcome I think of the last Mania um so that that's going to need growth too but the underlying Tech and idea is is really solid and is going to I think become a bigger and bigger part of the economy going forward one of the interesting things about most innovations that technology uh conforms
to really beautifully in the graph the esur right the value of a single telephone is basically worthless unless it's smartphone and I can play games on it right if I have a telephone and you have a telephone more useful but very limited in its use if uh we're best of friends and I want to talk to that every
day five times a day that's going to add to my value uh but where these become really really interesting is when everybody has one and you can communicate with anyone that you want to who will take your call um in much the same way the crypto use cases are contingent of on adoption by the maybe sometimes
slower adopters in the world yeah so for example the reason the internet really got adopted much more quickly than it might have otherwise was because of Pez uh dispensers what what what what basically back in the late 90s uh the guy who started eBay uh wanted to uh sell he collected Pez dispensers and so he
started selling them there but then that attracted people who were kind of like oh I I'm I'm interested in buying Collectibles and things like that and then a little phenomenon called Beanie Babies came along I have a daughter who was the right age for Beanie Babies I have a photo of her just decked out she's lying on the floor and she's SW
than all of her beanie babies and the way that people were transacting was via the Internet and so the great majority of people who still didn't trust the internet right they would say oh I'll call you with my credit card number don't put your credit card number on the internet right yep just just basically
we're like ah it I'm just gonna put the the number on the internet and and but the point but the underlying point that was interesting was that moved a huge number of people into trusting the internet and you know it it went from there right because it it had gained the trust of a majority of people the the challenge that you face of
course is you you've got a very vocal let's hope they're a minority but a very vocal group that are like saying like incredible things right imagine money it's you know and and you know USD H I'd never take USD I used to at the height of some of these bubbles uh when people would say USD is a biot currency I would
never take it I would always joke well you you do know that United States dollar is backed by the most powerful military the world has ever created that takes its marching orders from politicians that show repeatedly their willingness to use it and then I I found this gift of uh uh US soldiers during World War II de mobing right and they're
all like there's thousands of these guys marching off the ship and I said let me send uh some of my my boys buy to pick up that by worthless currency yeah but there is that's the aspect you can make a joke right but there is some truth behind that joke which is the idea that there are a lot of intangibles that make say the United
States dollar the world's Reserve currency right and they're based on trust they're based on ubiquity they're based on things that people don't think a lot about sometimes in that what is called the shadow economy what we used to call Black markets black markets are about a third of the total GDP of the
world and guess what black markets are priced in you yeah yes and so I used to joke to people that um younger people I would hold up and for those listening I'm holding up a $100 bill here and I would and I would say you know what you're looking at here you are looking at the original Bitcoin you can't trace it nobody can
find you when you use it so cash um the other aspect of your book that I really love is like you you tell some great stories about some very very colorful people than sure a few of the ones that have been getting the best response I I don't want to steal your thunder by suggesting the ones that that I loved but give us a couple of uh of the
stories behind because you met some really interesting or actually you interacted with some really interesting people who you never actually met in real life yeah well that that was the first thing that was pretty crazy about this was after I got you know after I felt like speculating was not the way to make it during that period And I wanted
to get into programming and so I started learning how to program things to build on ethereum and I wanted to help teams launch their tokens and H you know basically the the thing that got me really into it was gaming because like you like you said this technology can be amazing but if nobody's actually using
it for anything right then it's never going to be adopted and I've heard this you would know better than me but I've heard this as one of the problems with the first internet bubble was that you had these websites like uh webvan and pets.com that ended up later becoming huge companies right now we have instacart and we have chewy but the
problem back in 2000 was nobody wanted to put their credit card into a browser and so those companies never did well it took 15 years for that idea to fully play out and one of the things that made me buy into crypto and made me buy into a lot of the potential was that I had fortunately seen people already spending
large amounts of money on digital things and moving large amounts of money around digitally through video games and so I wanted to work with a video game company because it seemed so obvious to me that there will be a game in our lifetime probably within the next 10 years that people spend a lot of time in where they
do work for other players of the game and this could be anything from you know selling items that you found to even like digital therapy sessions in a virtual environment right that you receive payment for that you then want to convert back to Fiat back to dollars right because again like we do still run
on dollars it's that that's that's how you pay for things in the real world still and even a stable coin is pegged to the dollar right that's the money but there was there needed to be a good way to get the value of your work out of these games and crypto was the obvious way to do it and so you know I started
learning programming and I started trying to find a game to work with and the the one that ended up hiring me I didn't know any of their names they were all pseudonyms I I didn't know what they looked like I had never talked to them on the phone I had I had no background on them except that they had some influence in the crypto Community but I
I was brand new I had no proof that I knew what I was doing and they were willing to give me a chance to help do the coding for them and so I said YP screw it like I I hope you guys are trustworthy because you you never know they it I've heard this happen to other people where they get in a similar
situation and then it turns out the people who hired them were using them to run a scam and that was totally possible they could have just been taking advantage of me so that they could run off with everyone's money but it was kind of a risk I had to take because I didn't have any other great like employment options at the time so you
know that that side of it I think was fascinating of you could actually build something and the token that I launched with them at one point in the most generous interpretation was worth over a billion dollars right which was absurd uh and you know not real in in many for many reasons we can get into but it went
from you know nothing silly project that I'm just helping out on for experience to oh my God this thing is worth over a billion dollars and with never meeting them in person uh or or even getting on a phone call through that whole launch process just purely chat messages with Anonymous figures so that side of it is crazy and then there was this whole
other side of it of later on you know the the game is doing well and it's it's growing and they're they're getting a lot of interest and they end up raising an investment round and one of the investors turns out to be three arrows Capital which a lot of people know from that period because they were one of the big blowups they were one of the big
implosions likef and the founders are last I checked still on the run like hiding in Dubai there's warrants out for their arrest because they they were borrowing money on the same collateral from a bunch of different people and so when three Arrow blew up they couldn't pay back any of their debts and they caused
this crazy Cascade of crashes but they they invested in the game and I was so hyped up I was so excited I was like oh my God this is the this is the this is the validation this this is going to the moon now and the this this was what really broke the spell for me with some of these big influencers and really
caused me to lose a lot of my trust in the people who were uh most aggressively proz the space is somebody else tipped me off to the fact that three arrows was basically insider trading on their own investment they they had they had made this investment in the game and they knew when the news was going to come out
about their investment and so they had bought up all of these tokens on the public market over a million dollars of tokens on the public market leading into it and I assumed because they knew that as the news came out there would be this big pop and the token would take off and then they could probably dump everything that they had
bought publicly on everybody who followed them into the investment and you know I won't spoil what what happened from that uh anyone wants to read the book but that was when I was like man it's just brutal sharks all the way down and you know what some regulation is good like insider trading laws are a good thing there there should be rules
against this because I I knew that that's what they were doing but I found out kind of late and most people had no idea they just saw the token going up they saw the news coming out they all got excited they wanted to get in on the action they had no idea that the investors who were leading this were sort of lead you know they were chumming
the water right they were they were going to make money on it no matter what uh and that that was a kind of a tough thing to wake up to obviously not all VCS are like that there are wonderful VCS in crypto right really really amazing people who are are making the space great and again there are a lot of
people who are just trying to get as rich as possible at any expense necessary and you kind you've really got to know what game you're playing if you're going to get into that Arena um there's yeah there's a bunch of other stories like that as as the narrative goes the other thing that you talk a lot
about which I found fascinating was the the whole part of again this is all just hitting our base code of human OS the the idea of status right with nfts buying you digital status but potentially that status not transferring over to the real world um and yet we still because we're humans right and that's our base code we
still kind of think of it the same way it still drops the dopamine it still does all of those similar things so so if you were sitting down right now somebody read your book crypto confidential and and they got in touch with you and said that loved the book uh I'm I'm excited about some of these genuine use cases that uh that seem to
be very real what would be your guide let you're you're their Uncle who's taking side what would you be telling them like you know would it be back to the story you just told listen if the CTO names himself Excalibur and he's got a picture of a sword that might be a tell also might be fine wasn't a bad guy yeah yeah so what
would you tell them uh like here's what you got to watch out for if you see this this and this steer clear honestly what I tell pretty much everyone is you you have a choice you either go all in you quit your job you spend all day in Discord and Telegram and Twitter you work with a crypto company you allocate a certain amount of money to
investing in new things coming out and you make it your life if you do that there's a good chance that you could make a lot of money by getting it on the ground floor of something being really involved really understanding the energy of the market and whether we're in a speculative Mania or not um I mean that
still might not be enough to save you you might get too coni too convinced and hold it too long that's what happened to three arrows right they thought that it was going up forever but that's that's your shot to actually beat you know the beta of the crypto Market if you're not willing to do that if you're not willing to go 100% all
in just go to coinbase set up an automatic weekly buy of like Bitcoin and ethereum and maybe salana if you want to be a little spicy and then don't look at it just treat it like passive Index Fund investing and you just let that run for a while if you hit a point where you know you need to rebalance because now
suddenly 10% of your portfolio is in crypto and that feels too High then you know you can sell some and rebalance that way but either be completely passive don't try to time the market just do automated buys or go 100% Allin because where I see people almost always lose money is they you know they have their normal job they have their normal
life and then they're trying to do a little bit of day trading on the side and if you're doing that you're the ex liquidity because you are not food in enough to know when to get out and and the thing too is buying is not the hard thing it's actually pretty easy to look at the trends and say okay you know this
is happening I should I should buy something because we're the meia is starting to take off people are starting to talk about in the news again this is a great time to get in buying is not hard selling is hard selling is really really really really hard and you will Almost 100% either get scared in a week
and just sell it and then be kicking yourself and be stuck in that IND decision for months or years or you will hold it all the way up and all the way back down and you don't want to be in that situation so you know there there are amazing teams building really really cool things and there is a lot of potential in that industry it's a lot
like getting into working at an internet company maybe in 2003 or 2007 or 2010 right earlier days on this stuff and that if if it's exciting to you like go do that but if you're not going to go that all in don't even don't even play right like maybe give yourself $100 to to Monkey around with to scratch the it
but do not put serious money on the line because it's all going to get taken from you you also uh have a good uh method for helping you sell that you talk about in the book and that's the imaginary Imagining the money pile talk a little bit about Imagining the money pile this saved my ass so much it was it this this
thought exercise is the only reason that I didn't lose like everything that I put in to crypto because it when you buy something for $1,000 and now it's worth $50,000 you're not thinking oh my God I made $50,000 you're thinking I'm going to make another $50,000 you're thinking it's going to1 it's going to keep going
up and the question I started asking myself was okay pretend I don't own any of this pretend I don't have any of these tokens forget about what I bought them for all of that just try to really get into that head space and imagine I have all of that money in cash in my living room it's in you know fat stacks of $100 bills it's like the Walter White
scene in the storage un where he's like swimming on the pile of money right I guess that's his bodyguard is doing it but you know try to imagine that and then ask yourself if I had all of that money in my living room would I then take it and put it into Dogecoin would I put it into this video game currency
would I put it into this board ape and it'll probably be no that that looking at it that way you'll probably go actually I'd like to have some of that in my savings account it'd be cool to be getting 5% on that you know I this is great I would not throw all of this back on the table and just doing that is so powerful for trying to shortcut that
like loss aversion that sunk cost that that belief that it's going to keep going up because selling is hard it feels like you're you're you're you're missing out on these gains but if you imagine having to buy in again that might be what saves you and and is what what ended up saving me it it was that
and one other exercise from Nick muli actually of just having Target uh net worth allocations based on asset class and I hadn't done that in a year and then I did it and realized that 70% of my family's net worth was in crypto and we we we had a young kid and a mortgage and all this and yeah I mean I like I you not I was like maybe
70% is okay right like that's it's not 100% I know a lot of people who were at 99% I'm not that bad but I was like no this this is stupid I got to get that down to at least 50 because you know it's it should at least be less than half um and those two combined were really really really powerful and allow
you to be okay selling at any price without trying to time the market because if you're if you don't think about it that way then you will pretty quickly talk yourself into I'll just wait a week or maybe this will go up a little bit you know another 10% and then I'll sell and you that that's when you start to get in real trouble yeah and
the emotions are running the show then and it's like the clip from Star Wars where you're shouting so true and it the thing too is like if you're that in crypto all of your friends are in crypto and you're in Discord all day with them you're into telegram all day all of you have fully drank the Kool-Aid and you know this
cycle cuz crypto is starting to take off again it's starting to get exciting again things are happening and I I've removed Discord and telegram from my phone I unfollowed almost everybody on Twitter I removed the price tracking apps I can't let myself look at it I just I can't let the noise in because I
know if it gets in I will convince myself that I learned a lot last time if I go back in again I could do it even bigger this time and you know that again is really where you get screwed up and lose everything so you kind of have to be will to like you said turn off all the noise remove yourself from it so
that you can try to stay at least a little bit more objective about what you're doing yeah that's another we talked about ER patterns earlier if you if you for example uh you want to understand the way that uh the the the best way to stuck money out of people walk in to a casino and don't bet anything just just walk around and
observe everything that's going on right are there windows are there clocks are there free drinks are there uh slot machines near the entrance that make a lot of noise when people win yeah now why do the ones near the entrance seem to pay out much more often than the ones deep in the bowels of the casino like these guys are
literally Jedi Master of the Mind Tricks of sucking money out of people and you definitely see these these same things by the way same thing works with you want to start a cult I've got the playbook for you and it's very similar to this one Echo chamber make sure that everybody that is in that Echo chamber is hearing and saying the same thing
because in propaganda what is the single easiest way to get propaganda across repetition repetition repetition and then get other people's repeating it to you and you literally become hypnotized yeah and people don't understand that this works in a lot of areas of life not just crypto right that's why Ponzi was
able to do social proof man those early people who gave Ponzi money they weren't lying they were a lot of money look look at all the money I'm making they were actually like holding the money right and so it becomes so real that it becomes so difficult for us to have strategies if we're on our own we're because like literally
you're going to get sucked in if if you've got strategies like you're talking about one of like people will always say to me well like how do I know when to sell and I always gave very similar uh advice to yours just rebalance your portfolio once a year do it once a year yeah if if like all of a sudden you realize that uh stocks you
wanted it to be 60% stocks 40% bonds and all of a sudden the great financial crisis happens and you look at your portfolio and it's 20% stocks 80% bonds the thing you want to do less than I don't know jump off the top of the Empire State Building or set yourself on fire is to rebalance it to that 6040
thing but the discipline of doing that as a wonderful way of working really well with when things have overdone themselves or under you know gone the other way totally totally so I I think that you know simple rules that you follow can be super helpful and I think that like your book is great because the
first person version of it we listen we prefer that we humans like I mentioned earlier we were entirely uh algorithmic we were entirely Quant right no emotions involved how did I tell people about that way of investing I told them through a story a series of stories and I would begin my talk by saying I'm gonna tell you a story about why you
should invest based on stories and you know that that seems to be what we run on WE human beings run on stories and that's why I thought your book was such a success because you you could basically say almost everything that you've said in this book but if you wrote it in academic you know like the academics do in a dry dull manner like
first off you're not going to sell may you know Mom and Dad might buy it your your best best friends might by it but that's kind of it but they won't read it and if they do read it they'll just go oh my God like shoot me now man this is so boring and and that's why I like uh the the book and and where where you
make it very very real and you engage your reader what you're doing is you're engaging the same sorts of things that happen when you get involved in those bubbles or uh the the bus because that type of behavior is also uh pretty hard to uh predict what was the hardest thing for you not to put in the book oh that's
a really good question so I I had to cut a number of stories that I loved that I just I loved loved the first one that comes to mind is it's actually really relevant to what you were just talking about with Cults because there was this other project that was its own huge Mania within crypto called Olympus and Olympus was it was actually
trying to do something really really interesting where they were trying to create a a crypto an actual currency you know something that you used for exchange but that was based on the value of the crypto Market instead of pegged to the US dollar so you know usdc is going to be pegged to the US dollar an
own token was going to be based on what the crypto Market is worth basically so it was backed by a combination of Bitcoin and ethereum and some stable coins and all kinds of things like that where it went wrong was they they created a system to automatically rebase to automatically increase the number of mm tokens that
you had as the total value of the Olympus treasury went up so you know in the beginning there was only it was only based on $100 million or it was only based on $10 million of assets backing the currency and then it was 50 and then it was 100 million and then it was 500 million and so because the amount of
assets backing it was increasing the value of a single token kind of should have been going down because they would just print more tokens b as the number of assets went up right like it's kind of a natural way to do it so they they created a system where you could leave your own token in their app and then your number of
tokens would automatically increase as the treasury increased right great makes sense and then as those tokens get more valuable than the treasury you go sell some of them into the market and the market naturally balances the price of a token rout to the treasury you know game theoretically all of that was pretty solid it was it was a
cool idea the problem was people realized that if they just left their tokens in and didn't go to the market to sell them and you know balance out against the treasury their number of tokens would just keep going up and if nobody was selling them the value of them wouldn't go down and so in the in the beginning it was like you
know oh is backed by $10 million and the mark okay and the market value of of the 10 m of the mark the market value of all the oh tokens was also 10 million so you know it it was great but then it quickly got to this point where there was only $100 million backing now a billion dollars of token value because nobody
was selling them and like you said with Ponzi and I don't think this was a Ponzi scheme right like they they were trying to do something cool they just miscalculated this part in the beginning people just kept seeing their value go up they kept not selling and it literally became a cult it became you know none of us sell and people started
putting uh 3 three to represent the game theoretical outcome in a prisoners dilemma of if I don't rat on you and you don't rat on me we both walk free well if I don't sell and you don't sell we both become rich obviously that's absurd because somebody has to sell eventually but everybody held on long enough for it
to go to like 300 billion in treasury assets but a four billion token value and so there was only like 10% of the token value actually backing it but at the peak everyone thought this is going to 10 billion I thought it was going to 10 billion I was so convinced I was so and I I had put in 10,000 it had run up
to over 100,000 between you know the token price going up and my my number of tokens compounding and everybody was just so so bought in and excited and I I wrode that all all the way back down a lot of other people did and that was such a perfect story to capture this idea that if if something going up is
becoming part of a person's identity because people were putting oh in their Twitter bios they were putting 3 three in Brackets in their name on Twitter to show they were part of the M cult that was the time to sell because that was a sign that it had gone long past any real fundamental value and was now just this
pure Mania obsessive cultish everybody had drank the Kool-Aid uh and that was a big red flag but you know I I was fully bought in on it I I had an article that I wrote pretty close to the peak saying I was wrong about Olympus and here's what they're trying to do and it's actually really cool and yes it's overvalued but it should stabilize over
time and I I I should have just sold it that I should have been more emphatic in warning that it was just way overvalued and the other big cult that I didn't get to talk about as much but that I wish I could have talked about more was Tera Luna uh you you mentioned earlier that I'd made money on terara but that was
actually this earlier project called iron that was trying to do a really similar thing to terara I ended up losing money on Tara but the thing that I didn't lose money on with Tara was the stable coin and their stable coin was the one that was compounding at a fixed 20% interest rate and it was I mean that was the worst failure of the the whole
Mania because that that wiped out 50 or was $20 billion of the stable coin went to zero basically in in the course of a week and all the way up everybody was getting that 20% fixed APR every day you could just log in and you could see you know i' I've just gotten more free money and let it stay in it just kept
compounding and every thought it was going up forever and the founder I mean the founder was just an he was so mean and yelling at people on Twitter and calling them rude names and everybody was so bought into his hype they were like he's like the next Steve Jobs he's like the next Elon you know he's a hard charging entrepreneur who
won't take any doubters and they would Pile in on his tweets if anybody doubted them they would you know attack anybody who questioned it and that was a sign that was a sign that there is not enough fundamental value here to to believe in you have to rely on this like anger on this cult-like behavior and so when you
when you see a cult as as the main backing unit of a currency instead of you know a powerful military that's maybe a sign that there's just not enough here to actually rely on like a great counter to that is this app on ethereum called maker Dow which is the one that I used when I needed to borrow money to pay for my car and maker has
been quietly running on ethereum since 2018 19 a long time never had any failures has hundreds of millions of actually billions of dollars deposited in it people are borrowing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars against those assets nobody is picking fights over maker da on Twitter it's just
working it's just doing its job in the background very reliably nobody's really worried about it anymore it's been sufficiently drisk and like that's something that you should feel pretty safe using as crypto things go but if you see something in this coming cycle over the next couple years where the founder is this bombastic on
Twitter and people are putting the name of the of the project in their Twitter bios and you know starting fights over and saying yeah if you get in you're G to make all this money like get out just just sell right because that that's a sign that you're getting pretty close to the edge you want like boring unsexy
things even in crypto right like Bitcoin is boring and unsexy right I mean it's sexy in a way but compared to whatever the new crazy hype thing is it's comparatively boring but if you just put your money into Bitcoin and don't go chasing the hot new thing 90% of the time you're probably going to do better because you're not going to get caught
up in whatever the new Mania or cult is so C Cults are a pretty good counter signal for investing too and I I wish I could have included the oh story but it was like explain the technicality was slowing people down and I was getting into the the the real action around the token price of the game going up and it
was like okay this has to go just to make the whole story a little bit tighter yeah those are those are two great ones and I as I was reading your book I just kept looking at like old notes that I'd made about various schemes and there is definitely a Playbook right like one of the oldest schemes on Wall Street when you still
had to use snail mail right was a guy would do 10,000 right and he would buy the the mailing addresses and he would send letters actual physical letters to people oh yeah how is stock uh picking uh and Market timing uh genius he was the best of all the prognosticators and uh profits except 5,000 got his email or
his newsletter pitch saying and by the way next month the market will go up and then the other 5,000 got by the way the market will go down and then if the market went up he only went back to that 5,000 yep and just kept doing it and then he got down to his real marks which were the people who had received 12
letters in a row over a year in which every prediction he made was correct yeah that is almost impossible for a regular human to just go this guy really is badic he really does have a proof is right there yeah proof is right there yeah it's it's amazing well what is uh what's next for you what is what what are you working on
now I'm working on a Sci-Fi novel actually so wonderful yeah I you know writing crypto confidential was such a journey because I always been a how to self-help SL philosophical essay writer online and then I got into this and I pretty quickly realized that a howto non-fiction book was going to be boring for some of the reasons we talked about
and I said I have to learn how to write something really fun and exciting and I had no idea how to do that and so I started reading more like Thriller fiction you know I studied like how John Grisham writes and I was reading like sci-fi fantasy too to see you know okay what how do you make something really
fun and exciting and I started reading all these books on fiction writing because I wanted it to read like a novel I wanted it to have that energy to it and the more I got into studying fiction writing and and applying it to telling the story I just kept thinking this is really fun I'm really really enjoying this and there were all these points in
the story where I started thinking you know if this other thing happened it would actually be a better story right like if if if this had gone much worse or had gone much better or this other character thing had happened that would actually be a cooler story and so when I when I turned in the book last October I
said okay I have this idea for a Sci-Fi novel I'm just going to take my daily routine that I was applying to crypto confidential and apply to this novel and try to write a first draft and two and a half months later I had a whole first draft done and I had so much fun doing it and I started thinking man this is
great like this would be such a fun career to do non-fiction books when I feel like I have something worth saying I didn't want to get stuck in feeling like I have to put out a non-fiction book every year or two to like pay my bill because then I might you know do topics I'm less passionate about but with fiction I just sort of have
infinite ideas for cool stories I could tell and so I finished that first draft and I said this is what I want to do next and so I sat on it for a bit and then I got a second draft done and I've had that out to people for feedback the last couple weeks and now I'm starting to get into applying the feedback but
man I I'm I'm really excited to get back to work on that after this kind of promo tour is done and my my goal is to either get a good book deal for it by the end of the year or find out that I can't get a good enough book deal and start figuring out how I want to self-publish it because I'd be pretty open to self-publishing for Fiction it's it's a
very different industry than non-fiction or doing you know something like what you guys are doing where like one of these new hybrid Publishers something in between the two uh because man I I love doing it it's so fun there's so much of what I've been writing about in the past that like we were saying I think does
better in a story than a checklist or than a a 2,000w piece of advice and I would love to have that kind of author career where I just flow back and forth between these two kinds of writings so I'm super excited about that it it's been really really fun I can't wait to see where it goes very cool and my team
at infinite books would play me alive if I didn't say hey n let's see a manuscript we would might be interested in that 100% yeah I'd love to show to you guys we I've know Jimmy forever too so um well there you go I mean fun to work together that would be a lot of fun well this has been absolutely really as much fun as I
thought it was going to be I loved your book I recommend everyone read it can't wait to take a look at your science fiction uh I think that's going to be really cool if you've listened to us in the past you you do know that uh our final question is always we're going to make you the emperor of the world um and
you can't you can't put anyone in a re-education cab and you can't kill anybody but what we are going to do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two things into it and what will happen is everyone on the planet will wake up whenever their next morning is and you will have incepted them with those two ideas and
they're gonna say I just had two of the best ideas in the world and I'm like all the other times I'm gonna start acting on both of these right now what are you going to incept in the world's population the first one is definitely that it is worth the short version of it would be dedicated the time to know yourself
because if you if you have a as good of a sense as you can have about what you want in life or who you are what your strengths and weaknesses are what what's true for you versus what's been put on you so many other decisions become easier and become clearer and we've talked about you know the medic influences and the earlier and all this
stuff and so much of that becomes at least a little bit less effective if you have that that strong core that you can return to um and that you know in terms of things that couldn't make it into the book that was like a really really challenging process for me coming out of this uh and in writing this you know it was like really
really hard a lot of times and kind of realizing that I like didn't have good answers to a lot of those and some of the clarity that's given my life afterwards has been incredibly boing um so you know that that would be the first one is take the time to really try to know yourself and the second one and you know this is
one of the oldest ideas there is um so it's certainly not original but uh that this moment really is all there is um if you're if you're doing everything for some future time period or or always uh inent tuned in some past time period then you're you're never really living and I think children have been such a
blessing for starting to realize this more in my life and going through this whole experience and so I think if you can take the time to really know yourself and recognize that the the moment that you're living right now really it that's it um a lot of other stuff falls into place or it starts to sort itself out or
becomes a little bit easier to handle uh and I I would hope that that could help a lot of other people too the way it's helped me those are both great ones the first one reminds me of an old Wall Street saying which was if you don't know who you are the stock market is a very expensive place to find out it's so
applicable yeah and then of course the the second one is uh living in the n it sounds easy and boy is it not easy it's really really hard but if if you can life becomes quite a bit better Nat this has been absolutely a pleasure I wish you great success with the book and uh we will definitely have you back on
again uh after it's out and uh you'll see how you do with both the slings and arrows and with the uh massive amounts of praise thanks Jim this was super super fun I L love chatting today and yeah I'm excited to chat more in the future maybe show you the Sci-Fi novel and love to see it yeah keep the great work all right cheers thanks that