Unpacking OCD Part 2 with Dr. Patrick McGrath

Transcript

The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Brady's Mercedes Benz on Dundeele. Visit the Brady's Mercedes Benz showroom on Dundeele to find your next car. Dundeele Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit Dundeele.ie today. Tons of people have made 1,000,000, maybe even tens of 1,000,000 of dollars in the various crypto crazes of 2013, 2018, 2021, now. So in the book, crypto confidential, winning and losing millions in the new frontier of finance, Nat Eliason tells his own personal adventure of making a ton of money, losing a ton of money, making a ton of money, and how it all ended up at the end by making his own tokens or currencies for a game and NFTs. And you'll hear him talk about it on the podcast, and then we talk all about not only his story, but the future of crypto. And here it is. Great conversation. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. So what a riveting book. You were you kinda were living the dream. Like, basically, everyone talks about you. And I don't mean you specifically, but kids who not and not not that you're a kid. People who who made it rich during the various crypto booms off of I don't wanna say bad activity because you were doing good things, but it was there were there's been various trends in crypto that I've kinda, like, ridden all the way to the top and then ridden all the way down. And while there's a real industry being built underneath, that the the a lot of the get rich quick stuff kinda happened from NFTs and gaming or meme coins or we'll see what happens with these ruins and ordinals and stuff like that now. But maybe just describe the time and your journey a little bit, and then I have questions. Yeah. Totally. I think you put it really well is that there is this dichotomy in crypto. There's this cool, real, very exciting industry that I remain pretty convinced is going to become a bigger part of how we interact with the Internet and finance moving forward. And by the way, wealth real wealth could be built with that as well. Exactly. But that's slow and boring, and it's way more fun to speculate on whatever the manic thing is. I happened to be in a situation at the start of 2021 where I had some exposure to people who were in crypto. So I was seeing people who are in the thick of it making a ton of money. My first kid was coming, and I was naturally stressed and excited about that and unsure what money was gonna look like on the other side of it. And just I felt the FOMO. I felt the the FOMO really strongly and wanted to dive in and see how much I could make if I went all in on it. And I I had seen a couple of cycles at that point. I had seen 2013 from a distance. In 2017, I had put money into a couple of ICOs and just kind of lost all of it. And so I Did you see in 2013 anyone who bought Bitcoin at a $100 and wrote it to 20,000? Or, like, how did you see people getting rich then? I saw the stories on it probably wasn't Twitter. It was probably Reddit or maybe blog posts. And I had one friend. I think you might know him too, Justin Mares, who was pretty into Bitcoin at that time. And so he was talking about it a little bit shortly after, but I had actually kind of first discovered Bitcoin 2,011 ish because I was really big into gaming. And so I had one of those huge gaming PCs, and people in that community were starting to mine Bitcoin on their gaming computers because Right. They had the GPUs for it. And me and my roommate tried it for a day or 2 and thought, oh, this is kinda cool. Whatever. Let's go back to playing games. And then just deleted the software, and it probably didn't mind anything in a day or 2, but it's one of those kinda like, gosh. What if? And then 2 years later, I see that mysterious Internet money run up to $1300 and go, oh my gosh. There could be something real there, but it took 8 more years before I I seriously looked at it. The thing that I had going for me a little bit was that after the 2017, 2018 cryptomania, I kind of said, okay. There there seems like there's something here at least with Bitcoin. I'm just gonna go into Coinbase, and I'm gonna set up an automated buy. Just a $100 every week, and I'm not gonna look at it. And that ran from 2017 or early 2018 until the end of 2020. And combined with a bit that I had at the end of 2017, 2018, it turned into $70,000 Wow. Because I was a $100 a week all the way through the bear because it went down to $4,000 or whatever, and then suddenly it's shooting to new all time highs. And I opened my Coinbase, and I thought, oh my gosh. Like, where what hap like, where did this come from? I should see what else is going on here, and that kind of I I set a bit of that aside as, like, my gambling purse and dived into it. And then what I didn't expect was that I would get pulled even more beyond just the speculation but into the actual programming and building side. And going back to what you're saying at the beginning about the degenerative casino side versus the building, quote, unquote, legit side, I felt like that was a better long term investment of my time trying to figure out how to actually make something in the space and not just gamble on it. Because at first, you were playing around with this thing called farming, and you were Yeah. And you were like basically, it it what sounds exactly like a Ponzi scheme, you would the more you would invest, essentially, you would get paid new tokens. It wasn't quite a Ponzi scheme, but it was had the appearance of it. And, basically, there was no value there. It was just, like, money. You were spending money to to basically make more money, and then you would spend that to make more money. Eventually, that's gotta It's it's gotta gotta inflation. It's gotta if if there's no actual value being created by the new coins being created that you're farming, then eventually it goes to 0. Yeah. The the analogy I like for farming is if you've ever played one of those mobile games where you tap something to get gold or you know, cookie clicker, I think, is the original one. You, like, tap the cookie and you get cookies, and then you can spend the cookies on, like, grandmas that make more cookies for you and cookie factories and cookie farms. And the the whole goal is to just get more and more cookies. And it's like a weirdly fun game to play, actually. There's something satisfying about just seeing your number of cookies go up. And it's basically what farming was, except that instead of cookies, you were getting, you know, hawk tokens or whatever token they've decided to, you know, brand it with. And then the more of those tokens you redeposited in the farm, the more tokens they were paying you per second. And so people would go and buy tokens so they could try to get more tokens faster. And, yeah, it was just like this game of chicken of how high can we run this thing, how, you know, how much money can we each get on paper before somebody big makes the first move to get out, and then everybody rushes for the exits to try to, like, end up being profitable on it. And there's no fundamental value. Like, it's not like these things were DeFi exchanges or, you know, NFT trading places or there there wasn't there was nothing. There were they were it wasn't even claiming to be a currency, really. Yeah. Yeah. The the bare minimum a lot of them would do is they would just copy and paste the code for a decentralized exchange. They would copy a a bare bones version of Uniswap or Tsuchiswap, and then they would say, this is Hawk Swapp, and you're investing in the new future decentralized exchange. But there was no effort there. There was no serious product. It was just this, yeah, Ponzi game. And the amount of money that was moving around in these games was absurd. You they would get launched on one day, have over a $100,000,000 in them the next day, and then 2 or 3 days later, there'd be basically nothing in them again, and people would have moved on to the next one. The pace that this insane amount of money was moving around was mind boggling coming in as an outsider. And did that trend, if you call it that, did that eventually die out? Like, is that farming still happening? It's not like it was meme coins. But Yeah. Meme coins are the thing now. And and there this there's this kind of predictable trend in crypto where something something new and really cool happens, like the first decentralized exchange. You know, Uniswap launches, and everyone goes, wow. You know, that's super cool. And then a few close competitors launch that do pretty similar things. Right? SushiSwap launches and and a few of the other decks that have caught on on on other chains. But then stuff starts to get copied at a faster and faster and lazier and lazier rate. And as that happens, the quality and the seriousness goes down dramatically, and the speed of the peak and trough goes up pretty dramatically. So we saw that with people launching decentralized exchanges and the farming attached to them, and you don't really see that very much anymore. You might see another version of it happen on these new l twos in, like, 6 or 8 months if people try to rerun stuff from last cycle, but that game has kind of petered out. And, yeah, now it's these Solana meme coins are the thing. But we saw the same pattern with NFTs. Right? Because Yeah. You you had CryptoPunks back in 2017, and they were kind of the big ones. And then Bored Apes launched in, what, May 2021, and that was, like, a pretty serious high effort launch and then a few other relatively high effort ones. And then by the end of 2021, you had, like, every celebrity launching their ridiculous zero effort NFT project trying to get in on the cash. You know, the one thing about NFTs and then and this is gonna kinda segue into your story. The one thing about n I NFTs where I think there's real value is, a, kinda like what you were doing, which is characters or or equipment or points in a game, like one of these kind of big multiplayer games, using those as make making those NFTs because then they could become fungible or tradable with an you know, a quick like, if let's say I go from World of Warcraft to some other game. I don't know the gaming world. Now I could kind of take the, you know, amount that I accumulated in World of Warcraft after years of playing it. You build points and strength and this and that, and I and that's an NFT, and I can move that into the NFTs of another game. Yeah. I I think, you know, this was part of what brought me into crypto was I'd been in gaming for so long, and people had been building gray markets around game economies since the nineties, where these massive multiplayer online games, there would be items in them that were rare, and people would do whatever they could to exchange those for real world dollars even though the games forbid it. And you would have these, like, secret marketplaces where you could go on eBay and Yeah. Pay a $1,000 for an item, and then you had to, like, talk to a secret broker who knew how to get around the rules to make it not traceable and stuff. And, like, people were desperate to be able to get their money in and out of these games. So if big gaming companies start taking it seriously and make it possible for you to very easily move wealth through different video game economies, that's gonna catch on so quickly because people are already spending 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year in Fortnite and Roblox just to look different. Right? Like, purely for cosmetic items, not even for advantages in the game. These, like, digital status symbols are becoming a huge market really quickly. And so, yeah, like you said, the more that economy can be opened up, the more people will probably spend in it, and it's not getting smaller. And this is a this is a crucial question for the whole crypto, is it a fad or is it not a fad Yeah. Question. Why crypto for this? Like, why not just use eBay for it? Yeah. The I think the the main the main reason is the same reason that it's more convenient to have digital transactions versus using cash for everything in the sense that let's take let's just use, like, Fortnite and Roblox as the as two examples. Right? Because those are sort of the big ones where people spend a lot of money now. They're massive multiplayer games. You can look different. You know, you can interact with people and whatnot. Right now, if you wanna spend money in either of those ecosystems, you have to usually buy the currency within that game typically using a credit card or your your linked credit card through your, you know, EA Games account, whatever. And then you've got that game currency, and then you can buy the asset in the game. But if I have 500, we'll call them Fortnite tokens, and I wanna buy something in Roblox, like, there's no way to do that. And on the one hand, you could say, okay. Fortnite doesn't want you to be able to do that because they want you to keep that money in Fortnite. But on the other hand, if all of the games could be connected to a single wallet, right, like your crypto wallet, and you could pretty much immediately move money from one game to the other, then, like you said, whenever people have played a lot in one game and wanna start playing another game, it's so much easier for them to move their work and their wealth from one game to the other. And then on top of that, Fortnite or whoever can have an in game marketplace where you can trade Fortnite bucks for items and buy and sell items with other people. You're using the Fortnite currency. The game is taking a 10% transaction fee on each transaction, and then they can sell their own token in the market. And it unlocks this, like, big new form of revenue for them, or they don't even have to use their own token. They could just use USDC, which is, you know, a stablecoin pegged to the dollar. All those transactions can happen basically instantly. They wouldn't have to pay any transaction fees like they would with a credit card or whatnot. And then if you get tired of Roblox and you wanna sell all of your items and then bring your USDC or whatever over to Fortnite, you could immediately do that. And I think it's it's a similar argument to why it makes sense for countries to have connected economies. Right? Like, the more trade there is overall, the more, like, commerce tends to happen, the more tax revenue those countries get to collect. It tends to lift all ships. No. It's it's a really great point. Like, let's say Fortnite doesn't want to have their, you know, items tradable with items from other games. They're missing out on the fact that they might get more maybe they're afraid people are gonna leave Fortnite for another game, but they're missing the fact that it makes it more likely for a a much larger universe of game players to have access to Fortnite. Like, now, oh, I'm tired of this game. Now I could play Fortnite. And, yes, I you potentially could have Ebay be the marketplace to trade all these things, but you think think about it. If every like, gaming is sort of a good industry to kinda test out stuff, but, eventually, let's say Uber issues Uber tokens to people who ride Uber a lot and and to the drivers of Uber, and, you know, it's tradable for, you know, frequent flyer miles on airlines. If you may it creates this whole economy that ultimately makes more users and actually lessens the the the load on the US dollar. It actually decreased inflation because there's other currencies people are using to kind of navigate these different services. Yeah. You also end up with interesting arbitrage opportunities where if Fortnite does get less popular because there's some other hot new game, you would actually have people who are watching the popularity of games, and they're seeing, oh, you can actually make more money playing Fortnite right now. And so then they're hopping in, and they're, like, engaging in that marketplace because they're they're moving across all of these games where the economic opportunity is too. And we haven't seen how that might affect the gaming world as well. And there could be, you know, downsides to it. Right? You don't want a game to become completely financialized. But Which I think is what was a problem with gaming and the NFT stuff is that there are games just made for the value of their NFTs. They got it completely backwards. I I like to use this example. DOTA 2 is an extremely popular game right now. It has been for a long time. They have a real money marketplace where you can trade DOTA 2 items with other people for dollars. And most items cost 2 to $10. They don't cost the 1,000 of dollars that you had to pay for an Axie character or something in the peak of the mania. And so the the crypto games that came out during that period, including the one that I worked with, had this real problem where most of them were speculative assets first that tried to bolt a game onto them. And that's not gonna work because people just aren't gonna be as invested in the actual game. What will work is a big game that people love playing that adds a financial element to it because then it's kinda like a bonus, and then the items are gonna be more fairly and reasonably priced and not at these just crazy speculative numbers. Yeah. I think this is an enormous use case of crypto that hasn't really begun, like, with gaming for instance Yeah. But it hasn't really kicked off. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatrazgmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks. Another use of NFTs just as a random use case is, like, sports tickets. Such a Right now, sports teams can't make money if there are scalpers. But if you made if I buy, let's say, a $10 ticket from the New York Knicks, but then I sell it to a scalper for 50 and then the scalper sells it to someone on the day of for 300, The Knicks only made money selling it to 10 for $10 for me. But if these things were NFTs, then they take a percentage of every sale. They would make a lot more money, and it would make scalping legit. It would it would legitimize the whole industry. And and and by the way, this also makes new investing asset classes disconnected from the stock market so that people could still have opportunities other than McDonald's stock even in a bear market. And crypto makes sense for this because the technology is all built. Like, a friend of mine says, why don't you just use eBay for everything? Technology is actually better to do this in crypto. It's all the why reinvent the wheel? Yeah. Yeah. And the the big problem with the eBay example, especially for tickets or video games or some of these other things, is that you still need another middleman to broker the item swap, right, to actually get the ticket to the other person or to get the item to the other person. But if the tickets are presented by an NFT and you can buy the ticket on a marketplace kind of like an OpenSea but for sporting and music event tickets, it can all just be transmitted instantly. You can still just show the QR code on your phone. The user experience wouldn't be any different. But now the artist or the sports team is getting a cut of every resale of the ticket, and nobody's paying the absurd Ticketmaster fees. Nobody likes Ticketmaster and SeatGeek because you're you end up paying, what, like, 20 or 30% in in fee totals, which is ridiculous. And so you cut out that extremely bloated middleman, and the people who actually benefit from this thing, this concert or this sporting event, they have a much more efficient marketplace, and it is better for basically everybody except the ticket masters and seat geeks. And you also know if you buy a ticket, this is a real ticket. There's no it's a smart contract. You know you're getting you know sort of the providence of of the ticket. It did initiate with the New York Knicks selling it. That was the first transaction. You see the whole history, and it's a smart contract. You know it's verifiably true, and, you know, it's a that also takes care of the middleman. Because I was having this discussion with a friend of mine who doesn't like crypto, and he was like, why don't you just why don't we just build a whole centralized database? Why does it need to be this whole decentralized crypto thing? And there's so many there's so much functionality that crypto provides. My thinking is just like in with the Internet, social media wasn't a thing in the nineties. Like, GeoCities existed. It was sold to Yahoo for 100 of 1,000,000, but it didn't really have users. Same thing with tribes.net or Friendster. But then suddenly, the Internet hit a 1000000000 users, and Facebook and Twitter were successful. Around 2005, the Internet hit a 1000000000 users. With crypto, I think we're still, let's say, a 100 to 200,000,000 users worldwide. Yeah. So it's not quite at the tipping point. But when it gets there, I think this is gonna be a $1,000,000,000,000 use case of crypto. Oh, totally. And I I agree that the most obvious places where where it will start are wherever there are gray markets that don't have a good solution, and so gaming is a perfect example of this, and where there are extremely bloated middlemen so that there is a significant profit motive to cut them out like concert tickets. And those are just, I think, some of the most obvious places where we'll see somebody really go after it. Because if if a team built a really good seatgeek competitor that musicians and sports teams started using, you know, Blaub would be probably one of the first people to use it because he's a big musical artist, and he loves crypto. And where that platform is now only taking 2 a half percent instead of the 20, 25% of Ticketmaster or SeatGeek are taking, everybody's incentivized to go use that thing. Right? There's a really clear reason to try it out. But another marketplace that is not so inefficient, it's gonna take a lot longer for crypto to have an impact there. And so it does feel like those near term opportunities are wherever you see that that massive take rate that could be replaced by code, by smart contracts. Yeah. And by the way, I totally wanna get to your fascinating story, but this is conversation rush. Interesting to me as well. Like, the the this is all eventually going to the tokenization of real world assets. So let's say someone graduates from college. They have a $100,000 in student loan debt, but now they say, okay. I'm gonna sell off 10% of my future income. I'm gonna tokenize I'm gonna make James coin Yeah. Out of 10% of my future income, sell it, keep some coins for myself, and all my future income has to go through the blockchain so people see it. And then every year, 10% is distributed by the holder to the holders of of James Quinn. I could use that to pay off my student loan debt. And then let's say I get into Harvard Law School versus, you know, Mexico City Law School. Yeah. Nothing wrong with Mexico. Then people could say, oh, James Coin's going up. I'm a and this, like, also becomes an investable asset cla*s. So, again, uncorrelated to the stock market, and it's a way for to create a more efficient market around you know, you borrow from future income to pay off debts without paying Yeah. Too much in interest, and and and you also could potentially make money off of that as your income potential goes up. But you can't just rely on that because you have to make income or else James Coin goes down. Yeah. And I think we're going to see many versions of that in in semi controlled marketplaces. So a good example could be like a Shopify store where when you launch this Shopify store and you say, you know, here's the plan, here's the products, whatever, instead of doing, you know, like, a safe, instead of doing a normal investment round, you could probably, in the not too distant future, issue a token through Shopify that when being held guarantees you some cut of, you know, the revenues or profits or whatnot that that Shopify store is generating. Right? Or you could do it through Stripe. You could do it through one of these specific, like, transaction hubs to ensure idea. Yeah. Because then you're making sure that all the income is getting captured. Right? You could do it for a YouTube channel. You know, when you launch the YouTube channel for this show and you say, hey. I'm a successful author. I've got all these followers. I'm starting on YouTube. You can buy 10% of or some percent of the lifetime revenue of this YouTube channel with this token, that's something people will do. Right? Because if you found mister beast early and you could have bought some beast coin and and ridden that up, that would be a really interesting market. I'm sure that's going to exist. And here's the great thing. So what you just described is Kickstarter. Right? But Yeah. I can now sell my Kickstarter donation. So let's say I I donated to you to write your next book on Kickstarter. Now that's it. That's all I get for my donation. But now let's say if those donations were tokens I get back that that are the contract between what you promised me and what I gave, now I can trade with anything else. Yeah. It it becomes tradable. And that's the real benefit of of crypto is is decentralizing this and making peer to peer this trading. So I don't need the New York Stock Exchange. I don't need banks. I don't need the securities and exchange, you know, admit it, whatever, commission telling me what I can sell and and buy and hold. And, you know, it makes, like, thousands of new asset classes that, again, would would stave off recessions, and I think it would just be a net positive to the Yeah. World. And I I I understand the concerns around financializing everything in our lives. I I think those are fair criticisms. But I think that, historically, the more you have opened markets up to freer and more to freer trade and, like, faster transactions and more visibility into how transactions are happening, the better it's typically gotten for everyone. And so even if we run the risk of maybe financializing too many things, I do think it becomes a net benefit for everybody trying to build these new businesses, trying to get these new careers off the ground if there is a way to open up financial access to, like, every part of the stack. Like, startups are a great example of this because if you if you really wanted to make the most money possible investing in the American economy, you didn't get the best deal by putting it into the stock market. Right? A lot of the best deals happened in the private markets. And if you're looking right now and you're seeing, oh my gosh, SpaceX, you know, their a good last Starship launch is such a huge success. I really wanna be able to get in on that. Like, you can't because they're not public, and the only way you can is if you can have the connections and the huge amounts of money to get access to secondary. But most people don't have those opportunities, and that's kind of a shame. Opening some of those markets up earlier could be a net benefit for everyone. To your point, the ben the supposed benefits of regulation is just and financialization of everything. Let me start with the benefits. The benefits of regulation, which makes it harder for to the for to do the financialization of everything, is that there are scams. And you you you you yourself, as you describe in this book, have fallen for or seen many of these scams in the crypto world, and and you use the phrase quite a bit in the book, the the the Wild West. So for a while, the Wild West was this farming in crypto, and the Wild West was NFTs. Now the Wild West might be meme coins. But I would say every new financial innovation, there's a Wild West. So Yeah. Housing derivatives were the Wild West for a while, and there were a lot of scams, and it caused the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. Internet stocks were the wild west, so caused a recession. You know, even, you know, most things for a while, there's a lot of like, hedge funds in the early o's or in the nineties were the wild west, and there were a lot of scams where people took the money and then they disappeared, or, you know, Madoff started in the nineties and was a $60,000,000,000 scam. So these things exist, and then people learn from them, and the industry matures and grows up, and now hedge funds are an institution. Mortgage derivatives are normal business now. Savings and loans companies, which were the wild west in early nineties, just it's business as usual now. Junk bonds, wild west in the eighties, Business as usual now. So I think people have to relax, and, yes, there's a wild west where a lot of people will lose money, but some people will make money, and that's just the nature of it. People choose to lose money also in these things. It's not I mean, they didn't wanna lose money, but they decided to play in a dangerous deal. Knew what game they were playing. Yeah. There there's another thing on that, if if you don't mind me me hopping in on it, which is even outside of the finance world, what we've really discovered in the last 10 years is that we can create incredible regulatory systems without government intervention. Because for a long time, we thought that, a safe taxi system required medallions and certifications and all of these, like, government endowed systems for safety. But then Uber showed that, no, you can actually trust peer to peer evaluations, and you can use a rating system. You can do all these things, and you can create a safe system without government, you know, direct oversight. You can do the same with Airbnb. You know? Like, Airbnb showed that you can do it with hotelling, right, and hospitality. And we're we're constantly finding new ways to have decentralized regulation systems, and there will totally be a way to do that for financial assets too that won't require every single thing to be overseen by the SEC. And, yeah, we're totally in that Wild West phase right now, but we're, like, slowly figuring out better and better systems to regulate ourselves and create a more honest market without having to run every single thing through the government. Such a great point. Like, I never thought about it with the the Uber versus regulation on the on the taxi medallion side, but it's true. Now with you, so you you you said, okay. I need to make some money. I'm having a kid. This farming thing was the was the wild west. You were making a little bit of money, but it see you even recognized right away it seemed scary. Yeah. But you also had some coding ability. So suddenly people asked you to code, basically farming and and NFTs in the game. Yeah. So it you know, during that period, 2021, Ethereum and other Ethereum like blockchains were taking off because of all the stuff that could be built on them. You know, DeFi was the first big thing. Right? Borrowing and lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, and it was this big rush of what else can we program to be like these decentralized apps running on Ethereum. And that was sort of like the big exciting thing during that period because in, you know, 2017, it was just ICOs. There weren't really apps, and now there were all of these apps being built on Ethereum. But the only way you built them is if you knew how to code in this new programming language for Ethereum called Solidity. And Solidity is similar to JavaScript, but it's still its own thing. And because it was its own thing and because you had to get a lot of practice and use it a lot to, you know, know what you were doing with it, not many people knew how to do it back in 2021. There there were supposedly fewer than 10,000 active Solidity engineers on GitHub. And so when I had this idea that, oh, I should learn how to write Solidity code because if you went in any Discord for any crypto app, all of them were trying to hire Solidity engineers. And they were offering, like, 250 k a year salary plus tokens. You would only need 3 to 6 months experience because that was all that most people had, and then you could just get hired for it. It was it was a an extreme version of the programmer job rush during that period. And so I was doing this farming, and I was seeing people you know, they they go up and up and up, and they'd make money and make money, and then they'd make one bad mistake and just back to 0. Right? You you pick the wrong thing, and you get all your money stolen. You get out too late, and you lose everything that you made. It was really risky. Whereas if you learn how to build things, there's a floor on that because you're not putting the same amount of money at risk. You know? You're you're getting paid. And if you're getting paid in tokens and you pick the right project and their token goes crazy, that could turn into a pretty incredible payday. And so I I had a couple of one big scare and one truly awful event happen, and I said, okay. I've just gotta, like, go all in on the programming because I can't keep picking up pennies in front of the steamroller. And it it was really hard to learn because there were basically no courses. There were no boot camps. CodeMentor was this site that I used to use a lot to get programming coaching, and there were no solidity mentors on CodeMentor. So you were really YouTube videos? Like? Very few. Very few YouTube videos, and they were really focused on the most basic stuff, you know, launching a token, making an NFT. And there was no chat chat no chat GPT back then. And when I first started trying to figure this out, I I spent a couple of months just trying to, you know, get, like, a a few basic contracts going. Right? And it it was really just a grind figuring it out. And while I was writing the book, I went to chat gpt, and I said, hey. Could you write me the code for a new token launch? I just boom. It's it's done. Which So you so when you wrote it write the code for a new token launch, it's like you're make it's it's like you're making your own meme coin for instance. And and so there's tokenomics. Like, it describes how new coin tokens will be issued or or taken away. It describes what what the validating mechanism is with whether it's proof of stake or proof of work or something else. So not not for this because these were all tokens on Ethereum. And so you didn't have to worry about proof of stake versus proof of work or the validation or anything. It it really was as simple as what's the name, how many are there going to be, can you make more of them, can you destroy them, who gets them initially, you know, those basic rules. And I I started off really scared and worried about doing it, which is why it took so long to get going. But then I started looking at at more token contracts. I started looking at the code behind a lot of these apps that we're launching, and they were all using the exact same code. It was basically copy and paste. They were just using the same code over and over again, which was a huge unlock of, oh my gosh. It's not as scary or complicated as I thought. If you're really pushing the boundaries, if you're really developing new things, it's really complicated. But if you're launching tokens and NFTs, it's actually pretty simple, which is probably why today you're seeing hundreds of new meme coins launched every day on Solana because it's so easy to spin them up. And is that because also it's piggybacking on all the functionality of if you're building in an Ethereum, it's piggybacking on all the functionality of Ethereum. Like, let's say you made, you know, Nat coin, you know, in in this way back in 2021. Would there still be have to be valid you know, validation of every transaction, but you would use the Ethereum miner in the world? All of it. Exactly. So you're still just you're doing transactions on Ethereum, but using your token instead of moving ETH around. It once I once I figured out that there was this simpler layer to it, it's actually extremely easy. There there are whole libraries called OpenZeppelin or by this group called OpenZeppelin where you can basically launch a token in one line of code, and it spits out the 150 or whatever lines of code that you actually need for it. But even that is very, very simple. This was kind of the cool thing about Solidity code is that you it's extremely efficient and extremely precise and extremely clear once it's written. The scary thing about it is that once you deploy a smart contract, like a token or decentralized exchange, you can't change the code. It is locked in stone just because of how blockchains work. You don't wanna be able to go back and change, you know, how many of a token are issued later after you've already sold a bunch. Right? Like, that would be scary thing to be able to do. So By the way, funny you say that because that's exactly what the US dollar does, and that's what most companies do with their stock. But in the crypto world, that does not happen unless it's already in the code at launch. Yeah. And so the the other big benefit or the other big boon you have with trying to learn solidity or learn how to build this stuff is that because it's on the blockchain and because the blockchain is transparent, you can go read the code powering any app on Ethereum. You can just go to Etherscan, look up the code for Uniswap or AAVE or any of these big apps, and boom. There it is. You can just read through it. You can see that it's safe for you to put your money into. You can copy the code. You can run your own tests on it. You can do whatever you want, which is really, really cool as a way to learn. Because if you were trying to learn how to rebuild Facebook's algorithm, you're never getting that. Like, there I mean but then how do you launch the token? So you have the code for the token. Where do you launch it? Like, how does it start how do people start buying your token? Yes. So the way a smart contract works is it's sort of a it's basically like a mini computer sitting on top of Ethereum. And if you make one of those mini computers for a token, it knows where all of the tokens are. And so if I have a 100 NAT tokens, I can send a command to that little computer saying, send James a 100 NAT tokens. It checks to make sure that I actually have them, that you actually exist. You know, it makes all those checks, and then it just sends it. But that little computer is just running autonomously once I deploy it. So I would write up all of the code for the token, and then I basically just run another command on my computer, and I pay a little bit of ETH as the transaction fee to create that mini computing unit, and then it just lives there forever. And because it's just living on the blockchain like basically everything else, anybody can use that to move the NAT token around assuming they have it, or we can send some of it to a decentralized exchange. And the exchange knows that if this is the the address for this token, then the symbol for that token is NAT, and there are this many of them in existence, and this is who has all of them. And you can look all that stuff up publicly. But you have to know kinda, like, how to write the code to actually deploy it in the first place, and that can be the tricky part. But once it's deployed, you can go to some of these sites that, like, interpret the blockchain for you, and you can just click a button to move your tokens around. Or I can take those commands from the token contract, and I could put them in a website. So you could go to, you know, my website and say I wanna buy, you know, $10 of Nat coin or whatever. But anybody could put that on their site too. It's totally accessible Because it's based on Ethereum, could I then trade it on Uniswap, which is Yeah. Built on top of Ethereum? Yeah. Yeah. You could trade it in Uniswap. You could actually add it to any exchange you wanted, and I wouldn't have to give you permission to do it. As long as you had some of those tokens in your wallet, you could go to you could go to Uniswap and say, okay. I have a 100 NAT tokens, and I have 1 ETH. I'm gonna put both of them into Uniswap. I'm gonna create a trading pool. And now 100 NAT is worth 1 ETH. And if somebody else went and they said, oh, I wanna buy 10 NAT, then, you know, 10 NAT would get deducted. The amount of ETH would go up by, what, point 1. But now 90 NAT is worth 1.1 ETH. So now, you know, the NAT token's more valuable. And so the price would constantly be changing automatically based off the Uniswap balance of those 2 tokens, and nobody else has to facilitate that trade. You don't need a market maker. You don't need to find somebody immediately on the other side of it. The trading can just run autonomously on the Uniswap smart contract. Why with the recent mania for meme coins, like, making these valueless coins, why has Solana become such a popular you know, Solana is like an Ethereum killer supposedly. Is it because of the transaction fees are are smaller and it's a little it's a little you could do a little few more transactions per second? Yeah. Yeah. It's totally because of the transaction fees. Because on on Solana, you're usually paying less than a dollar, sometimes less than 10¢ to do one of these transactions, whereas on ETH, if the network is busy, you might pay $50 or $100 to do a swap. And that's why Ethereum is really not trying to be the active layer anymore. It's just trying to be the security and final settlement layer. And there are these other, like, layer twos being built on top of it, like Coinbase's base chain. And base has pretty comparable speed and transaction fees and everything to Solana, but the benefit of it is that it's using Ethereum for all of its security. So instead of every transaction having to be done directly on Ethereum, Base can bunch up a 100 or a 1000 or 10000 of them and check them into Ethereum in batches to bring down the transaction cost dramatically. And so you lose a little bit of security by being on base, but you get this incredible increase in speed and cost of transaction. So what we'll probably see is a lot of the day to day things, a lot of the little transactions happening on an Ethereum layer 2 or on a Solana, but then you'll see the big things happening on the Ethereum layers. BlackRock, for example, has launched a fund on Ethereum for doing some, like, yield bearing tokens. They've been tokenizing treasuries. They've been doing some really cool stuff, but they have $500,000,000 in there. So they want it on the safest, slowest, most proven, most secure chain. Because when you're moving around 1,000,000 of dollars at a time, you don't care about a $50 transaction fee. Yeah. But if you're trying to buy coffee, that stops working. Right. Their governments are their clients. You know, it's not a big deal. So you basically then made your own currency slash tokens for this game craft that was being built, and it had a launch, and suddenly all these tokens that you were paid in to develop this had value. Like, what was the peak value of the tokens you had? I mean, it that it was it was so crazy because they were they were the first one of the first teams I reached out to to try to get a gig. I wanted to get my feet wet. I wanted to get some experience, and my friend had found them. They were doing something I was really excited about because they were trying to build, like, a Diablo Warcraft style game, which I loved for all the reasons we talked about earlier. I was just so excited about that potential. And, you know, so I was bugging them, trying to get them to hire me because they needed an engineer to build their token, and I was like, I'll do it. I'd love to do it. They said, okay. You know, what are you gonna charge? And I said, you know, 2 ETH per week for the 3 weeks it'll take to do this, which was a pretty fair rate, and I figured they would negotiate against it a little bit. I was like, that seems reasonable. You know? Pay me 4 to 6 ETH, whatever. That'll be great. And they just didn't have the money. So they they were like, we can only pay you in tokens. And in my head, I'm going, okay. I'm not I'm never gonna make any money off of this, but it'll be a good experience. So, sure, I'll take the tokens. And the deal was we were gonna launch it with a 100,000,000 tokens priced at 1¢. So the game would be valued at a $1,000,000, like, not not a crazy amount for a new crypto project launching. And so I said, okay. Can you give me a 1,000,000 tokens so that'll be worth about $10,000? That's that's a fair amount to get paid. And they're like, yeah. Cool. Deal. And then we put those tokens in a smart contract so that it released them over a year. So I didn't get them all at once so that I couldn't just dump it on the market, But it also made sure that they couldn't, like, back out of the deal and take them away. It was a good, like, trustless way to do it. And so we put them in, and then we were getting ready for launch. And a bunch of the, like, wealthier people the team knew said the price was too low. They said if you launch it at 1¢ with, you know, this many tokens, there's only gonna be 40 or $50,000 of trading liquidity. So if I wanna buy a $100,000 of this token and these guys had, you know, 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars to throw around, and they were willing to put a 100 k into this game launch. They said, I I can't do it. There's not enough liquidity. So we had to up the launch price to 10¢, and I'm going, okay. Like, now I'm getting paid a $100 for this. This is pretty sick. And, you know, and they were totally, you know, fine with it still. I was like, alright. Cool. This is a great deal. And so then we launch, and during the first couple hours of launch, it spikes up to over a dollar 50. And I'm like, oh my god. I I just got paid a million and a half for, like, 2 weeks of work. This is insane. And then, you know, of course, it dropped back down to 20¢, and it stayed there for a bit. But still, I'm like, okay. Cool. This is, like, $200 that's gonna come out over the next year. This is great. They they kept building the game, and it kept, you know, getting more excitement, and there was that big NFT rush. And then after the NFT rush It was legit as far as, like, they weren't they weren't scammers. They were trying to build a legit game and legit NFTs. And And and there were people actually playing the game, and they were launching new parts of the game every week. There were, you know, dungeons you could go through, and you could fight the monsters. And you you owned your character as an NFT, and you could sell the NFT of your character if you didn't wanna play anymore, and you could, you know, trade the items amongst yourselves and all of that. And, like, you know, they were really doing it, which was great because there were so many scams and cash grabs at the time that it was cool to be actually working on something where they were building a real game. Like, they were really, really going for it. And so the the NFTs start taking off, and then gaming starts taking off. And, like, Axie had their crazy moment where Axie Infinity it it was worth, like, 20 or I think it was $40,000,000,000 at the peak. Right? Just absurd. And and they start going down, so people look for the next game to put money into. And there was another game called DeFi Kingdom, and DeFi Kingdom runs up to, like, 2 or 3,000,000,000 in the span of a week or 2. And we're looking at that, and we're going, are we next? Like, what's gonna happen here? And then, we get to the end of December, and DeFi Kingdom starts going down. And then people find CryptoCraft, and they start putting money into that. And then in the course of 2 or 3 weeks, the token goes from, like, a dollar dollar and a half to $13. And now I'm looking at all of my tokens, and I'm going, oh my god. There's, like, $13,000,000 here. This is just, like, more than I ever could have possibly imagined coming from this. You know, here's here's where I you know, where where it's really hard for me to reflect on this story is in my head at that time, I'm not going, okay. This is insane. I need to get all this money out right now. I'm going this is going to a 100. The this isn't stopping here. This is just the beginning. It's gonna keep going. And so the you know, when I'm claiming my tokens every day and I'm turning some of them into ETH, I'm redepositing a lot of them. Like, I'm not taking the money off the table. I'm just doubling down. It it was like it was more money than, like, I ever imagined. It was more than I could have possibly hoped for, and I just wasn't taking the vast majority out. I just kept doubling down. And a lot of my tokens were locked, so I couldn't access them. But even when they're locked, though, you could could you still you could still engage in private transactions and sell your locked coin? No. Not real you could you could in theory, but there wasn't it it would have been like a it wouldn't have been a crypto transaction. It would have been, like, a written agreement. Right. It would have been a dumb contract instead of a smart contract. Exactly. Would have been a dumb contract. Transfer the coins from the wallet, but you could have made a contract that obligated you to. Exactly. Yeah. And and I didn't do that, sadly. And, you know, now now those tokens are worth, like, 2¢ apiece. But you did do some transactions with with private investors. Yeah. Yeah. What I did was, you know, as it started taking off, I realized that, 1, it was gonna be impossible to time the market on this. And 2, even you know, this is the big problem with a lot of crypto tokens is that at the peak, all of the CryptoCraft tokens combined were worth over $1,000,000,000, which is insane. Right? But there was less than maybe $20,000,000 of liquidity to actually back that up. Usually, there was less than $10,000,000 of liquidity to back that up. So if somebody went if somebody had all the tokens and tried to sell them all at once, they wouldn't get a $1,000,000,000. They would get, like, 10,000,000. So the tokens were actually worth way less than it seemed, and this is a big problem in a lot of crypto tokens is you might think that you have this many tokens worth this amount. But if you're one of the big holders and you try to exit your position, you will tank the price immediately. So I knew I couldn't really sell in large batches, and so I wrote a little bit of code that I could run on my computer where it would claim my tokens for the day and then sell a portion of them to ETH and redeposit the rest of them. And so I would just roll over in bed every morning and hit a button on my computer and boom. There'd be a $1,000 of ETH in my account. And then it was, like, $4,000, and then it was $10,000. And, you know, it just it just it kept going up and, you know, just completely destroyed my relationship with money during that period. None of it felt real. Didn't wanna take any of it out. Just wanted to keep doubling down with it. And like I said, you know, I reinvested most of it or locked a lot of it up. You only get to that point by being crazy enough to leave a lot of money on the table, and that mindset eventually comes back to bite you. Yeah. But but you at some point first off, it's very interesting. Like, this is one aspect of crypto, which may or may not be a a benefit. But if people know your what your wallet is, they they Yeah. You actually don't have the privacy Yeah. That you would expect. You could get that privacy, and in most case, in 99.999 percent of cases, you have that privacy. But because you were a major developer on this project, people knew what your wallet was and how many coins were in it. It was kinda Yeah. Laid out to investors and and everything. So it's as if your bank account information could be viewed by everybody. Yeah. And so not that they could access the money, but they could see when you were accessing the money. And so you had people call you saying, hey. I thought you were really into this project. Why are you selling? It turned into a huge problem, and I've talked to a lot of other people in crypto who had this same experience for for better or worse, where when you're getting paid in the token of the project you're working on and other people are investing in that token on the hopes that it goes up, if you're selling a chunk of it, it looks like you don't have faith in the project or, like, you're trying to rug people or you know something that they don't. And, you know, that that's understandably can be scary for for people who are watching all the transactions come through. And so in the beginning, when it was just smaller amounts, like, nobody bugged me. But then when when when every day my amount of tokens unlocking were like it was, like, $50,000 of tokens, and I would sell 20,000 of them a day to ETH or whatever, I started just getting all these DMs and these Twitter messages from people being like, you know, what the f**k are you doing? What's wrong? What, you know, are you scamming us? And I'm like like, I have a kid in a mortgage. Like, I can't eat these tokens. Like, I gotta sell some I can't leave all of this on the table. By the way, I still have 1,000,000 of dollars on the table here. Like, I'm way more invested in this than you, but I have to take some off. And it it just got nastier and nastier. I mean, people were going to the team and telling them that they had to fire me and kick me off the project because I was selling these tokens. And the team was like they're like, what do you mean? Like, he's working harder on it than, like, almost anybody. Like, he's the most invested person who is selling tokens. Like, be mad at the speculators who are dumping, like, not the people on the team. But it's a huge problem, and I talked to a lot of people who had 1,000,000 of dollars of tokens liquid for projects they were working on, who never sold any of them because they were so afraid of the optics, and they just wrote it all the way back down to 0. Now could you have could those people I there are these exchange traded funds where you kinda pull your wallet in with a bunch of other people's wallets, so you're, like, diversified. So everybody kinda owns all the wallets together. Was there anything like that that was open to you? I I could have done that. And if I had thought that the game was going to go the way it did, I would have set it up more intentionally or more carefully like that, but I I didn't think it was gonna turn into much of anything. And so the place where all the tokens went was nataliasin.eth. And so, you know, it it was pretty blatant, like, how many tokens I was getting every day and exactly what I was doing with them. And there were there were a couple hundred people who were subscribed to updates on my wallet through through this app. Crazy. Yeah. Through this app called Zapper, and so they would literally get a notification on their phone if I did anything in crypto. And because they, like, wanted to see what I was buying. They wanted to see what I was selling, and that was not fun. What if you what if you had just ignored all that? And what if you had gotten fired? You still had all the coins. Yeah. Right? So That that's ultimately what I what I did is I I said, you know, this sucks, but I've gotta do what's best for, like, me and my family. And I know that I'm working on this game. I know I'm not scamming people. And so if people are gonna get upset about it, like, that that's kind of on them. And for a while, I I did talk to everybody and have pretty frank conversations. I sent a lot of people screenshots of how much I had invested to show them. I was like, no. No. No. Like, I'm really in this, and I have to take money off the table. But, eventually, I had to just be like, you know what? I can't, like, argue with everybody about this. It's if they were in my situation, they would do the exact same thing. Like, just game founders, like, Leroy was, like, after you to stop selling even though you had to make money. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's what I told him too is and we we ended up getting in in multiple fights over this where he he was telling me to sell less because it looked bad, and I was like, no. Like, this is what I have to do. And if you wanna fire me, but you're not going to because I am working on this a lot. Like, I'm helping you guys, and, you know, it's like this this is just how it has to be. But it's there's a lot of downsides to having your whole financial life public like that, and I think that's why crypto has this pseudonymous element to it, where if you were one of those people who got in on the, you know, the initial offering for ETH and you bought 10,000 ETH at $1 and you still have them and you're worth tens of 1,000,000 of dollars now, you probably don't want that tied to your real name. You don't want people to know that about you. So there there's definitely some cons to the public element, and there are incredible benefits. Imagine if you could exert that much scrutiny over what your city is doing with your tax dollars. You'd learn a lot of stuff really quickly. That would be a huge boon to society. So there there's definitely pros and cons. And and at this time, because it was kinda like you know, this was this 2021, 2022 mania or, basically, 2021, you know, it was even greater than the 2018 mania. There was Yeah. NFTs. There was, you know, starting to be, like, these meme coins and stuff. So, like, you had you knew other people who were getting involved, like your friend Johnny who kind of you were together from the beginning doing this farming and then other stuff. He was getting into NFTs. What's the outcome with him? Yes. You know, John, he he really had kind of a wonderful story through it, which is why I thought it was important to include it because when when we started, he was running a cafe in Austin, and it was just bleeding him dry. And he, you know, was sort of, like, barely scraping by on it, was incredibly passionate about it, but the money wasn't working, and it was getting worse and worse. And he was one of the people who had, you know, barely survived COVID. And so we started doing started doing this farming stuff, and he had commissioned this, like, incredible espresso maker to get built and had hired this, like, company in China to do the production on it. And we we we started out doing this farming together, and then I got really into programming. And I started having this outcome with CryptoCraft, and he got really into NFTs. And, you know, in in in March, we're sort of like day trading Doge and starting with farming and trying to make a couple $100 a day. And then there's this scene towards the middle of the book where we're at brunch. And at the start of the brunch, Johnny puts, like, $10,000 into an NFT launch. And by the end of brunch, he's up 20 grand. And he was just he was in this crazy like, the really, really fast paced NFT speculation, and he had built such a name for himself in that space that people had notifications for his wallet too. And so he started having to, like, make other wallets and move money through Coinbase to hide from the people who were trying to, like, you know, copy trade him and and and cut out what he was making by being so in the flow of it. And he he showed me this stat once that he had spent over a $100,000 on Ethereum transactions during that period, but it was profitable spent because the NFT flipping was so insane. And then the, you know, one one kind of sad thing happened, which was the the manufacturer in China screwed him over, just took his money and ran, and he was out, like, $2250. But he had made enough from the NFT selling that he was able to offer refunds to everybody who had preordered. And I I I won't spoil how that story ends because it has an interesting ending, but he was able to, like, you know, resolve that issue. He was able to shut down the shop, which was a sad moment, but also kind of, you know, freeing for him. And he was able to, like, you know, pay out the employees for a couple months longer than he would have if if he had to shut it down from actually running out of money. You know, he and his partner were able to, like, move into a more comfortable spot. Like, he he had this kind of great outcome from going so crazy in it, but he also had kind of the same, like, psychological outcome that I did. It was really, really taxing and really, really rough, and he he, like me, doesn't let himself touch the space at all anymore because the psychological costs were just so painful. And What does he do now? He's working on just the espresso maker? Or Working on the espresso maker, and he has he has another job in a totally different industry, but the the maker is hopefully gonna launch in the next couple of months, which is pretty exciting. So it's like that. And he was able to, like, take the time to really do it right. You know? It's like building a cool new piece of hardware is an incredibly challenging job, and you can, you know, rush it, do a little cheaper, and just get it out there, or you can, you know, take your time with it, make it really awesome. And he was able to buy the time to to do it right, which was great. For for both of us, we had these things we were really passionate about. For me, it was writing. For him, it was coffee. And we kind of bought the freedom to actually go after those things in a very serious way for a few years that we didn't have the freedom to before. And, like, that to me is that's one of the best outcomes I think we could have asked for. Sure. Like, right now, obviously, this woman, you're you're working on this book launch, and this is an important part of your career. But, do you have plans for a next book? What kind of writing would you like to do? What what inspired your interest in writing? Who who were your initial favorite writers that you were saying to yourself, I wanna be like that? Yeah. That that's a great question. I, you know, I got into writing in a funny way. I really wanted to do startups and entrepreneurship, and I was a philosophy major in college with no relevant skills. And so I kind of looked at what would be useful to start ups and what am I already kind of good at. And there was this cool intersection with content marketing because I could write well and start ups needed content. And I started out doing content marketing. And in the beginning, I was studying I was studying you, and I was studying Tim Ferriss, and I was studying Ryan Holiday, and I was studying the people who were, you know, really crushing that game and trying to write like that. And I I ended up getting really into SEO. I had a search engine optimization agency for a little bit. And then after this story happened, I was like, you know, I've always wanted to really write a book, and this is kind of, like, my opportunity to do it and to try to do it in a big way. And I never thought that I would want to write a, like, memoir finance story, but the opportunity kinda fell into my lap. And it it it was just like this perfect storm. But when I oh, go ahead. Oh, go ahead. No. You're good. Okay. I was gonna say but when I started on it, what I quickly realized was that I had spent most of my writing career doing, like, how to highly optimize blog posts, which is very different from a, like, psychological thriller memoir story. I basically spent the last 2 years just studying writing while working on this. Like, I didn't do hardly any other work. I was just like, I need to get as good as possible at storytelling and making this fun because the only way I'm gonna make a crypto book really mass market interesting is if it's like a fun beach read if people are gonna have a good time going through it. And so I I studied that, and I I tried to make it as fun of a read as possible. And along the way, I learned that I actually really love the, like, fiction esque writing. It's really, really fun for me. That's why I was gonna say I wouldn't call it a memoir. This there's this new brand, I'd say, that's about one and a half to 2 decades old of narrative nonfiction. That's what this is. It's narrative nonfiction. Because you'll write this over and over again and with your next story and your next story. Like, you'll have experiences kinda like, you know, 4 hour work week is you know, he your or outliers by Malcolm Gladwell or, you know, all those books in your in the background of your Zoom picture that I'm seeing. But, like, what it seems like it would be helpful to read, like, some fiction writers to write you know? So, like, for myself, I read people like Raymond Carver or Dennis Johnson or even Charles Bukowski just because they they're they really ultimately wrote narrative nonfiction, and they called it fiction. Think all their stuff's nonfiction. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's it's it's that, for me, was really improved my writing. Yeah. That that's actually exactly what I did is I studied writers who could get people to just boom, boom, boom through a novel. John Grisham. I read A Time to Kill, which is wonderful, and it's his first book. And then I reread the beginning a bunch of times to try to get that energy into my writing. And another one that I really studied was Red Rising, which is this wonderful oh oh my gosh. This is such a treat. You're it it's a wonderful fantasy sci fi novel, and there's 6 books in the series now, so you can really go crazy with it. And he he's such an incredible, like, fast paced storyteller with a very strong opinionated first person narrator. And I wanted to bring That's great. I'm I'm getting it right now. Oh, you're you're gonna love it. You're really, really gonna love it. I really wanted to bring that energy in it into it too because and that that was so helpful. So what I would do a lot of days while working on the book is I would get up, and I would reread some of my pages from the day before. But then I would read, like, the first chapter of Red Rising or some of the first few pages of A Time to Kill or one of those books before I started writing so that I was in that headspace of that storytelling mode so I could bring some of that energy into the book. And that was by far one of the most useful things that I did. It's amazing how much reading one style will suddenly will suddenly influence how you write the next, like, few days. Yeah. Exactly. Like, it it takes about a a a day or 2 or 3 to to wear off. But, like, if I read like, let's say just as as a blunt example, like Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Suddenly, I'm writing in this super minimalist style. Yeah. But I like that. I like that feeling of absorbing his style and bringing in my own kinda humor and storytelling and so on. So it's it's it's it's good. I always think that's the best way to to write. It's sort of like when you're learning a coding language, you you kind of set up the basic environment, you know how to code from other languages, and the best thing to do is to modify someone else's code to learn coding. Totally. It's it's funny because it it works in the other direction too. So you asked about the next book. I'm actually working on a sci fi novel, and that's been an incredibly fun experience. And I was doing the same thing. You know, I was studying sci fi, figuring out kinda who I wanted to emulate, whose style I wanted to learn from, and, like, dark matter by Blake Crouch is just god. By the way, best TV series of the year so far. I haven't watched it yet. It I I really You gotta watch it. Okay. Okay. I And I like Recursion by by by Blake Crouch as well. Yeah. I I and his pacing in that book is just incredible. It's just boom, boom, boom. Doesn't stop. And so I was using that to prime me for writing the sci fi novel. And then I took a break, and I reread East of Eden by Steinbeck, which is just a beautiful not just incredible, like, maybe greatest novel of all time. And but then I went back to work on the sci fi novel, and I started writing in kind of that style. And it was, like, a completely different energy, and it was, like, slow and descriptive. And it honestly, I was really, really proud of the chapter I wrote in that style. It was, I think, some of my, like, most beautiful writing, but then I threw it away because I was like, I can't use this. This is the wrong energy. I'm like, obviously, I'm nowhere close to Steinbeck, but it was interesting how quickly that totally changed how I was writing. You've gotta be, like, really careful with your your inputs when you're in a writing mode because they'll they'll get in there quickly. Like, when I do most of my writing, which is in the mornings, I make sure I don't read necessarily thriller kind of stuff because I'm trying to you know, if you're trying to write short blog posts poignantly, if you're just getting to, like, action action action, it's not it's not as good. Yeah. But but, yeah, you have to be very careful about the input. And and people don't realize this is an important aspect of writing is that, like you say, the inputs that you put in is is what comes out combined with your own style. Totally. And, like, your your subconscious is so incredible at processing things when you're not thinking about it, when you go on the walk after the writing session and the ideas pop into your head. And so if you're letting in social media and the news and all this other stuff, that's what ends up popping into your head when you give it a moment's rest. And so you you have to curate that that input layer so deliberately if you wanna get that that best writing work possible out. It's it's kind of fun to be in that monk mode where you're being so deliberate about it because it is just this incredible force multiplier for how good your art can be. Yeah. No. It's, I I I can really appreciate that that cycle, and this is this is a really good book. Like, did you sell the movie rights to this book? I bet you people want the movie rights. We've had one person reach out, and we're still shopping it in Hollywood. So we haven't sold it yet, but we've had a little bit of interest. And I think that there will be more once it's out. Like, you know, I I have a really hard time with this. I'm a very self critical person. I'm I'm very hard on myself, and it's hard for me to, like, say something is good. But I think it's a good book. Like, I and I think it's gonna do well, and people seem to really enjoy reading it. And I think it would be fun as some sort of film production, and so I I'm excited to hopefully see that happen. Absolutely. I could totally see this as a Ben Mezrich style Yeah. Like, movie. Yeah. Yeah. I So it's, like, in a hot area. It's a lot of money involved, and, know, it's young people doing their thing, and it's it's good. And then gonna be so fun. What's next in crypto in your opinion? Like, obviously, there are these in in terms of, like, the Wild West side, there's these meme coins, which I think that's already kind of run its pace a little bit. Like out. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm sure people I'm sure there's people out there who made 10, $20,000,000, disappeared, and you'll never hear from them again and whatever. There's probably hundreds of there's probably thousands of people like that who have just made 10 10,000,000 or more from crypto and are are just now gone forever, just living their life. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not a small number. And I say this in the book too that there's going to be more manias. Right? And there's gonna be new waves of things in crypto that have these manias attached to them. Like, it could be SocialFi, you know, Twitter where you can invest in people to, like, buy and sell their tokens. I'm sure gaming is going to have another much bigger run. There will probably be a new NFT thing. There will be a new, you know, type of blockchain. There'll people will be excited about. I mean, the big one this cycle is gonna be AI coins, AI plus crypto projects. And some of those seem like they're really legit and really interesting, and there's gonna be a lot of garbage too. And it it's hard to uncover, like, particularly, like so I always look for coins that actually have users Yeah. Corporate partnerships, you know, good developers with a track record, but it's hard to know okay. Like like, a great idea would be, here's a coin that's, gonna be a decentralized network of everybody's health care information. So you own your health care information. So if AI wants to use your health care information to for to train their learning model, They they have to buy it from you and Yeah. Because because it's all on blockchain. You could do that. But it's hard to know. Okay. This is a great idea. Are people actually using this? Right. Which coins there's very few analytics that tell you there's a lot of analytics that tell you how much is being bought and sold every day. Very few analytics that tell you how many people are actually using this for real use cases. Totally. And And I I mean, that's gotta happen. Yeah. And you you can sometimes find a Dune dashboard, you know, Dune dotxyz that shows you best Dune is the best way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. But, honestly, like, what I tell most people is that if you're not gonna go live in this world, if you're not gonna quit your job and be 247 in the flow of information or if you don't have access to somebody who has that level of information, don't even try. Like, you're gonna be the exit liquidity. Just, like, buy Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and leave them in your Coinbase account and just don't think about it. Because if you're, like, half in, half out and you don't have that level of information, you might buy at the right time, but you're probably just gonna hold it too long and ride it all the way back down. And you you don't wanna get caught in that, like, messy middle of being kinda, like, half in half out. That said, if there's if there's a wave of things that people are actually using and they're paying you for I mean, I could totally see a decentralized AI computing token where you can rent out GPU cycles on your local computer to some, like, AI processing system, and you're getting paid in their token. And if you have a gaming computer sitting around like I do, like, yeah, hook it up. Get paid. You know? The problem is there's there's there's tokens specifically for that, but then there are also tokens that initially for other decentralized computing use cases, and they all seem to switch over to decentralized AI learning models because Yeah. That's, like, the hot thing. So now it's hard to really sift out, like, what's their real business model and who's using it. Yeah. It's sort of why I do generally think just hold the the big hold the big ones. If you're not really, really gonna be in it like, I don't even play with the speculation very much anymore. I might throw a little bit at something on Solana just to feel alive occasionally, but for the most part, I'm just holding the big stuff. It's you've gotta be so in it on because it's still really a wild west. It's very I mean, for the same reason that you shouldn't be casually looking at startup pitches for angel investing, like, in your free time unless you have access to pretty incredible alpha. Like, you probably shouldn't be trying to bet on which of the new crypto apps is going to be the one in 5 years. You know you know what's interesting is, the prediction markets, like, poly markets. Super interesting. Just on one bet, like, the election who's gonna win the election? $200,000,000 is bet on that one question. They have a whole bunch of, you know, things you can bet on, and so and that's built on top of Polygon, I guess. You know? So there's, like, a a real fundamental use case that there that and it's I guess the benefit of crypto is it's hard to regulate it because it's just decentralized out there. It's you you can't regulate it. So And, you know, there's there's no trusted third party, and, I you know, that that's a big winner. I think that what we're gonna see in the next 2 years is Coinbase rolling out point of sale integrations so that merchants can accept USDC and and then not have to pay a transaction fee. And that'll probably catch on pretty quick because they'll save 3% on every transaction. And Yeah. Then they would have a more direct relationship with their customer because they could you know, you could attach some personal info to when you pay with USDC using your Coinbase Wallet on your phone. You know, stores could use NFTs for, like, loyalty cards and things. There's a lot of interesting stuff that comes with that. But just being able to cut out that 3% they're paying is it's a huge unlock for a cafe. Their margins are so tight already. I could see that getting pretty big pretty quickly. There's something like 3,000,000,000,000 in transaction fees around the world that are paid every year. So that's all being, like, soaked out of consumers' hands and put into big banks. And if you could that's a huge source of inflation. If you could just eliminate that, you you've the world saved $3,000,000,000,000 a year. That alone is, like, a big benefit of at least everything moving to a stable coin, you know, on a blockchain. Yes. I think that's why we're seeing Stripe integrate both Solana and Base for for payments because I think they see the writing on the wall that Visa and Mastercard are not gonna be able to keep charging 3% for very long. And so Stripe wants to, you know, be that middleman, be that facilitator. So Stripe can still take a tiny fee, but if you're paying 0.1% instead of 3%, like, that's a pretty sick deal. Most people are gonna take that. What what about Block? Are they doing something similar? I they must be. I haven't seen anything about it, but I'm sure they are because they could just integrate it directly with all the Square readers. I know that they are so Bitcoin focused, though, that they might not want to do a stable coin thing. But I Yeah. Jack Dorsey is a maximalist, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe if there's a really good Bitcoin stablecoin, which actually I think could happen, you could have a BRC 20. Maybe Circle will launch 1. They'll launch USDC on a Bitcoin l two, which is totally possible, and then I could see Square doing it. But I'd be surprised if Square adopted an Ethereum based or a Solana based stable coin solution unless they absolutely had to. And how do you think Elon Musk is gonna eventually you know, his his roots are in payment systems. So, eventually, he's gonna turn Twitter into some kind of payment system, and I doubt he's gonna use Dogecoin. You know, he's he's got smart people around him who know the crypto space better than he does, and it would not shock me in the slightest if all of the tipping and the subscriptions and everything else on Twitter or x gets switched over to using, like, USDC on a on a native l two for them or on base or something where you're not really gonna have a transaction fee. Because then if if you just have casino chips, you know, if you're not, like, doing a credit card transaction each time, people spend it more, and they can take a cut of all those transactions. You might see people tipping, you know, a fraction of a cent on things that they like and whatever. You could pretty easily build a system where you have an x wallet or a Twitter wallet that you're loading with USDC, and then whenever you like a tweet, you're sending them, like, 10¢. And I would do that. Right? I would be totally happy to do that. That would be cool. And you would probably see a lot more, like, microtransactions happen on an existing social network like that than a whole new one gets spun up just for that use case. Yeah. That's fascinating. I never thought that of it that way that it would encourage actually more not only more liking, but also more tweeting. Like, everybody who previously used to tweet a lot and maybe died like, I used to tweet a lot more than I do now. Maybe I'd get back into it just to kind of it's another thing to just sort of keep score of Yeah. You know, as opposed to just likes and follows. And it would simplify the thing they've started building with doing creator payouts because, you know, I get paid maybe, like, 20 or $50 every week for being active on Twitter, but that goes to my Stripe account. And then I have to, like, send it to my bank account, and then I have to use my credit card if I wanna subscribe to somebody on Twitter. It's just a really inefficient system. Yeah. Whereas if it's just all sitting in a Twitter USDC wallet or just sitting on my wallet, which is just connected and authorized for Twitter, like, you're just gonna have a lot faster transactions. Removing barriers to transactions tends to make more of them happen. So I can see there being an incentive for them to do it. Interesting. Well, look. That crypto confidential winning and losing millions in the new frontier of finance, such a great book. So interesting to talk to you about all these topics. Please come on the podcast again. I love having great guests come on more than one time, and and congratulations on the book. I I know it's gonna do really well. Thanks so much, James. This was a real real treat to get to do this podcast. Like I said, you're one of the people I started following in this space 10 years ago, and it means so much that you liked the book and would love to come back on and maybe talk about the sci fi novel or something when that's ready too. Would love it. Or if you or a lot of times, just come on, and we'll talk crypto stuff. Yes. So George is just saying. I think it's gonna get real crazy interesting over the next few years. There's gonna be a lot of neat stuff that comes out. Yeah. I agree. Well, thanks again, Nat. Crypto confidential. Thanks, James.