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Curious Worldview
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Curious Worldview
Nat Eliason | From Crypto To Copy: Exit Liquidity, Crypto Confidential & Writing Worthy Of Posterity
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Nat Eliason is an absolute legend.
I’ve been subscribed to his newsletter, following his tweets, and listening to his interviews for what feels like years now.
He’s a prolific online writer who recently published his debut book, a memoir of a crypto side quest he spiralled deep down into which is serves as revelatory for the sheer insanity that is crypto. It’s meme coins, making loads of money, losing it, secret discord servers, exit liquidity and all the rest that foreshadows the same stuff happening now.
Crypto is back in the news, and therefore so is Nat’s book - Crypto Confidential - which is a must read if you want to get a sense for, or contribute to, the mania.
However, writing is Nat’s circulatory system, so we ended up speaking half about books and half about crypto. When you check out the episode, navigate the timestamps if you wanna skip the writing stuff and go straight to crypto.
Before I leave you with Nat, he’s got this tremendous call to action on his Substack that I wanted to share here…
“Among my strongest life goals is to write something worthy of outliving me”
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00:00 - Who Is Nat Eliason?
01:08 - Serendipitous Anecdote
02:58 - CRYPTO: Crypto Mania
12:23 - Writing
18:05 - AI Helping Writers (Great Metaphor)
24:48 - Great Story Telling Less Great Writing
34:08 - Taleb's Influence
41:08 - Book Publishing Market (VC Metaphor)
1:00:33 - CRYPTO: Crypto From All Sides. Crazy Stories. Current Market, Ideological? The Future.
🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg
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Nathalyson is an absolute legend. I've been subscribed to his newsletter, following his tweets, and listening to his interviews for what feels like years now. He's a prolific online writer who recently published his debut book, a memoir of a crypto side quest he spiraled deep down into that is so revelatory of the sheer insanity that is crypto. It's meme coins, making loads of money, losing the majority, secret Discord servers, exit liquidity, and all the rest that foreshadows a lot of the same stuff that's happening right now in crypto markets. Crypto is back in the news, and therefore, so is Nat's book, Crypto Confidential, which is a must-read if you want to get a sense for or rather contribute to the mania. But because writing is Nat's circulatory system, we ended up speaking about half books and half crypto. The timestamps make this clear. So if you want to skip the writing stuff and go straight to crypto, then navigate all of that through there. To finally introduce Nat, he's got this tremendous call to action on his sub stack that I just wanted to share. Among my strongest life goals is to write something worthy of outliving me. In my eyes, that is perfect. And here is Natalia. So I wanted to start with this incredible anecdote that I had today, very serendipitous. I'm in London for work and I was meeting with a client, and at the end of the meeting, we started talking books, and he brought up crypto. Um, and I mentioned Zeke Fow and his book number go up, and then he goes, you know, I'm actually reading this incredible book right now. I think it's called Crypto Confidential or something like that. And and I and I interjected, that is so amazing that you've actually said that. Um and then I went on to explain that I have this podcast actually interviewing Matt today, showed him my calendar, you know, just a totally insane moment. And I just thought for you, this anecdote, two random guys you've never met, um, on the exact same day, just randomly having your book brought up in conversation. I couldn't imagine that there is, you know, any better organic feeling like that as it no, there really isn't.
SPEAKER_00That's pretty amazing. It's been really cool to see too. You know, the the book came out and I had the initial launch fanfare and whatnot, but it definitely came out at a challenging time for that topic because nobody cared that much about crypto outside of crypto, you know, there was no like retail mass market interest over this summer when the book launched. So it was pretty quiet the last few months. And then I was telling you just before we got on this call, like yesterday or Monday was the the highest rank that it had hit on Amazon since launch, which was just awesome. I mean, like books don't normally do that, right? You get like the peak when it launches, and then it finds somewhere where it settles. And to see it kind of like and this was my hope was that it would get out, it would get some reviews under its belt, and then when the bull market came back, then there would be a lot more motivation to read it. And hopefully starting to see that play out now. So it's exciting.
SPEAKER_01How significant has the uptick been?
SPEAKER_00Pretty meaningful. I mean, like it was just not selling many copies the last month or two. It would, you know, it would hang out around like 250 to 500,000 on Amazon in books, which is low. You know, it's like a few copies a day, and then on Monday it jumped up to like 10,000 or 12,000. Nice, right? So it's pretty significant, and it hit number one in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency books that like happening, which was really cool. It was like me and then Michael Lewis. It was like, oh, okay. I I texted it to my editor at Portfolio. I was like, Yeah, we did it.
SPEAKER_01It was pretty cool. That's worth framing, man, honestly.
SPEAKER_00I know, I know, yeah, yeah. It was it was it was pretty awesome to see. So I hope that it hope that it keeps up and the word of mouth keeps spreading. Because it is like, I mean, it's a book for a mania, it's a book for a bull run. It's about, you know, like being in that craziness and making the most of it, not losing your head during it, the emotional ups and downs as well as the financial. And so I think that uh people can hopefully get a lot of value out of it as we're entering this like next crazy era of crypto.
SPEAKER_01It's fun to hear you say that because I've heard you talk about that you don't want this to be a crypto book, but rather a more perennial archetypal story about risk and trading and market chicanery and so forth. So is there a kind of double-edged happiness here that your new sales are off the back of a crypto bull run?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I it's not necessarily that I didn't want it to be a crypto book. I didn't want it to be a book that was confined to that era and to like that that um where the technology was in 2022. So like I did focus a lot more on the psychology and the human dynamics and um, you know, the you know, like what's going on behind the scenes that could recur in this cycle, the next cycle, the next cycle, and in kind of like any other mania. So it it it does make sense. I think that it would would come back with it because on the one hand, it is like a bit of a warning about getting too obsessed and in, you know, too deep and how you can lose yourself of that mania, but it's also kind of a how-to manual, right? I think you depending on how you want to read it, you can read it like kind of prescriptively, and it could be valuable in that sense too. So um, I mean, hey, what whatever gets it in more people's hands, I'm pretty happy with.
SPEAKER_01Which story falls in your DMs more? Hey Nat, I also fucked up big time, or hey Nat, thanks for giving me the blueprint. I'm actually gonna try and give this a go now.
SPEAKER_00Uh honestly, the the first one, like some version of it, you know, it it was such a crazy time, and people got so wrapped up in it, and it was so all-consuming. And almost everybody who was super wrapped up in it had at least one or two like big mistakes that they made, where they let something run too long and you know, saw the money they thought they had earned just disappear, or they got out of something way too early. I mean, I've already had a couple of those from this cycle. My my friends and I heard about dog with hat, you know, months and months ago, and were buying it at like, I don't know, in below 50 cents, right? Like maybe, maybe below 10 cents. I can't remember. I'd have to go look at our text messages. And now it's at like $2, right? And it's probably gonna get listed on Coinbase in the next week or two. It's just like, and and none of us held it, right? We were just like, eh, eh, it's like it's this probably isn't gonna go anywhere, and now it's a multi-billion dollar asset. You know, it's just like everybody has those stories, and particularly with how it impacted their relationships. So other people who had, it's it's almost always guys, right? Other people who had girlfriends or wives, and like the tension it caused between them that they were letting these huge amounts of money ride, and you know, whether or not it worked out well, I think there was a lot of oh, there were a lot of other people who felt some sort of shame around how they behaved during that mania. And to see somebody talk about it so openly like I did in the book, I get a lot of messages from people who are like, it just felt really good to kind of be seen in that way and to know that I wasn't alone feeling this way afterwards because I felt stupid and like, oh, everybody else did so well, you know, and I'm just this like idiot who messed up and like hurt my relationship. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like that happened to so, so many people. So I get a lot more of those messages so far. We'll see in six months. Maybe in six months, I start getting the like, dude, I just I followed the bought a house. Like, I'd love to get those messages too. Uh I wouldn't complain.
SPEAKER_01It makes sense, like the survivorship bias is going to be we don't hear the bad stories, but there is two ends to every trade.
SPEAKER_00The liquidity comes from somewhere, you know. So if one person turns $10,000 into $10 million, like the $9,990,000 came from somewhere.
SPEAKER_01That type of uh dramatic um skew is also kind of a foreshadowing to when we talk about the publishing market. But uh Are you back are you back trolling the Discords, the telegrams? Uh have you been sucked completely back in?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to be responsible about it. You know, the the big difference this time from last time is that you know, last time going in, I didn't have much of a crypto stack to start with. So I was kind of starting from not zero, but like closer to zero. And I, you know, I didn't know what I was doing, and I was trying to work in the industry. And this time I kept as much of my crypto as I possibly could from last time. You know, I wrote it down 80% and have written pretty much all of it back up. Um, sold what I needed to because I basically stopped working on anything but writing two years ago, which you know doesn't make much money in the short term. It can compound something in the long term, but it's a long road to get there. So I've just been using my crypto as like my bank account, basically. Um, but spending as little of it as I possibly could, knowing that we were going to get back into this at some point. And so the the number one thing that I don't want to do is put that stack at risk, right? You know, if I have, you know, call it like a hundred units of whatever left over from last time, I really don't want to put more than like five or ten of that 100 at risk because I, you know, it it'd be way worse to lose all of that than the the downside of losing all of that would be way wor would be much more impactful than the upside of you know tripling it or something, right? Or doubling it. Like I if I had to choose between like staying neutral or taking a risk of tripling it with a risk of losing all of it, I would definitely just be neutral, right?
SPEAKER_01It's just not hard lessons learned, though.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Hard lessons learned, and it's you know, it's it's kind of like it there's this book, it's not a good book, but the core lesson is quite good, which is uh The Millionaire Fast Lane. Oh yeah, did you review that like a one out of ten or something? Yeah, yeah. I mean no, I I think I give it higher than that. Let's see. Um because it's one of those books, and there's a few of these books where no, I I gave it an eight. I give okay, which is well then I'm just remitting eight again. I'd give it a five or a sexy thing. Um I haven't given many ones, like you are a badass by Jen Sincero is a one, Eat That Frog is a one. There's a few ones, but yeah, no millionaire fascinating. It's like the the core the core idea is that like saving and investing in index funds is a terrible way to get rich. Like it is if that's you know the main vehicle you have available to you, if you're not going to consider anything entrepreneurial or whatever. But his point in the book is that like you should just reinvest into yourself and not the market until you get to like five or ten or twenty million, and then you use index funds as like long-term wealth protection. And so you really have to know if you are in the aggressive accumulation phase or the protection phase. How about that? Yeah. And and last cycle I was definitely in the aggressive accumulation phase. And now it's like, okay, I've got two kids, I've got preschool nanny, like mortgage, I've you know, I've got investments to sustain me for quite a while. Like I'm in more of the protection phase now while still being a little stupid. You know, it's like you got to scratch the itch in a small way so that you don't feel compelled to scratch it in a big way. Yeah, but for you, the dream is rotting, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that's that's the main thing that I'm focused on now. So, you know, did crypto confidential and that was like an awesome experience, and I'm super, super happy that it like got all of the great reception that it did, and that now like the sales are starting to pick up again, and now I'm working on a sci-fi novel. And so that's the big challenge is like, oh, there's this like the gold going on right now. Like, I got dude, I got fucking nothing done the last two days on the book because I was just I was in the telegrams, I was in Twitter again, like looking at price charts, and um, so I've got to figure out that balance because I don't want to lose six months of writing. I really, really don't want to lose that.
SPEAKER_01Totally. And you've built up such an insane momentum for that as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And that that's been the cool thing about I mean, gosh, having the freedom to just focus on writing for two years, I've gotten so much better and so much faster. And it's it it actually, I don't know, that sounds like I'm puffing myself up, but it's it's true. Like I look at the first draft that I was doing for Crypto Confidential two years ago, and I look at the writing that I do today on the sci-fi novel, and it's like two different people.
SPEAKER_01It's just so much better. So, what's the difference there? How do you how do you actually really tell that? Is it just reading it back and you being able to uh reconstruct the sentence and know, okay, that was way better? I wouldn't write a sentence like that again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it it starts at a more meta level around like storytelling, right? Because I do think that one of the easiest traps to fall into with like getting better at writing is that thinking you do it with like really great sentences. And I think that's not true because you know, if if you can tell a really like an excellent story, it kind of doesn't matter how good the sentences are. And so you have to start at that level, right? Like you really have to start at this meta level of okay, can I tell a story with an interesting hook, a a satisfying, non-boring middle progression, and a rewarding yet surprising payoff that people actually get through, right? That they then you know recommend to other people, right? Like, can you create characters that are like interesting and differentiated that have their own voices? Can you uh bring like a setting to life so that somebody reading it can actually imagine what's going on, right? Like those things are way harder than I expected because I I'd always been this like self-help how-to blogger, right? Like that that's what I did for 10 years before I started working on crypto confidential. And I naively assumed that the easy part would be telling the story and the hard part would be explaining the crypto concepts. But I had to spend a good eight months just insanely focused on learning how to tell an exciting story because if I couldn't do that, then nobody would learn the crypto concepts and it wouldn't be an entertaining book. Um, and so that's been very fun to go deep on.
SPEAKER_01How much was your editor a contributing to that learning curve? You know, what was it more story where to put things, or was it more on the granular sentence structure level?
SPEAKER_00It was more story where to put things and and a and uh feedback on technical explanations and things like that. And and he definitely helped. And he he pointed out um parts of the book where I could improve, but I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the work was just like self-directed. It was studying books on writing. It was picking books that I wanted to write like, and then you know, going over a chapter in them kind of like over and over and over and seeing where the difference was between my writing and their writing, you know, pretty maniacally editing parts of my book, figuring out how to like break down the different meta-levels of editing so that I could kind of like attack those one by one. It was a lot of self-study.
SPEAKER_01Um Are you more impressed by an insanely good nonfiction book or a fiction book? Oh, fiction, for sure, no.
SPEAKER_00Because of the whole story aspect of it, building uh unique voice. It there's a lot more elements that you have to figure out how to do well. And not and fiction just carries a lot more than nonfiction does, right? In the sense of like there's kind of a formula in nonfiction that works, you know, the the story, the takeaway recap, like that kind of like structure within a chapter, and then you can put a few of those together. Um, and like that format I think is a little bit easier to quickly dial in, or it's actually very easy for an editor to kind of like top-down create for you from a body of knowledge. So, like that genre of nonfiction I find less impressive than very exciting genre fiction because like you know, romance gets a bad rep, right? Like Colleen Hoover gets a bad rep because it's like, oh, it's bad writing, but Colleen Hoover sold like 10 million books last year, right? Don't fuck with that. Single woman in America basically has a Colleen Hoover book. I mean, that is just like a level of market penetration and reach that is unrivaled in nonfiction by any like James Clear is probably the most successful nonfiction, and James is an incredible, like an amazing human. I love James, right? Like, this is not a criticism of him. This is like he's been able to do that with one book, right? Which is incredible. And she's done it with like eight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Succession.
SPEAKER_00Well, like Marion Keynes, I think she does that as well. Every second is a new book out. James Patterson is 70 years old and has published 400 books. Wow. That's incredible. Like that's probably a book every three months for 50 years. What a beast. It's insane.
SPEAKER_01I do it do you get a little bit skeptical, like how much of that is ghostwritten?
SPEAKER_00Or a decent amount of his is ghostwritten at this point. So what what Patterson has done, he has done, he's a fascinating person to study in this regard, is he's mastered his writing style and his storytelling style to such a degree that he can train ghostwriters to the level where he can give them a premise and they can like get the first draft or whatever of it done, and then he can kind of like craft and direct it from there. So he's not typing out every single word anymore, but they're still very much like his books, you know. We're gonna encounter this a lot more in the AI era, where the, you know, it's like you think of like Christopher Nolan, like Batman is definitely by Christopher Nolan, tenant is by Christopher Nolan, but he didn't act out all the parts, he didn't, you know, he didn't make every single edit, but it was his creative direction that like brought the whole thing to life. And I think authors are going to have to move in that direction with AI tools, especially, because you you can get a better product by strategically using these resources, and it's still very much your product. That's totally true. Yeah. Yeah. As long as you're not letting it do the writing for you. You know, the the flip side of the James Patterson model is like um what's a good example here? Like like these celebrity memoirs, right? Where it is their story. I'm not saying it's not their story, but they didn't really write it, right? It was ghostwritten. And so it's not totally in their like writing style because they might not even have a writing style.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Do you do you know who Shane Warne is? No, who's that? Uh he's one of Australia's most celebrated athletes of all time, uh cricketer. And he wrote two or three memoirs over his life, and he famously admitted in an interview before he died, he'd never read a book his entire life. He hadn't even off his own memoirs. I love that. And the phenomenal bestsellers and everything, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that there's this actually a lot of people don't know this about the nonfiction industry, but there are these like structural editors who will put books together based on your body of work that do a lot of the heavy lifting for many of the best-selling nonfiction books out there. And they might only have like a throwaway mention in the acknowledgments, but they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to like perfectly structure these books to be bestsellers. Like that works. Um, and honestly, that was a consideration I had to make when I decided to write Crypto Confidential was do I want to do the best seller nonfiction, like, you know, hire the team that can pretty much guarantee they'll get it there if you have a decent sized audience, you know, that they're like extremely well proven, or do I want to like try to do this whole thing myself and do something kind of like weird and different? Because Crypto Confidential is a weird book. Like it's it's not like most nonfiction books, but to me, you know, you asked like, what's a really impressive nonfiction book, or what do you really get impressed by non-fiction? And the thing that impresses me is when people do something kind of different, right? Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is it's like a mess of a book in a lot of ways, right? Like just there's a lot of pieces of it that like flow weirdly, the the time changes, the you know, uh kind of like giving philosophy speeches versus like telling the story versus the historical story, uh, or like you know, go to Leisure Bach is just an insane book. Yeah, right. It's a weird book. Yeah, you you you have these like Aesop fables and then like deep computer science, and like those are what's those are what are cool to me.
SPEAKER_01Or a fellow like Nasim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, was technically nonfiction, technically a memoir, but very weird. And famously no one would publish it because it didn't fit into any of the predescribed boxes. Yeah. Now six, seven books later, the man is one of the most celebrated nonfiction. Authors in at least his niche, but even more broadly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean Anti Fragile is so weird. Like it breaks all of the rules. It's like six different books that don't always tie together. There's like a long segue into statistics in the middle that's like, I mean, you know, I basically just like skip to that chapter because like I don't I don't need to understand this part. He doesn't use historical stories, he just makes up stories to tell the point. I love that stuff.
SPEAKER_01I love that too, actually. Yeah. Yeah. It's so refreshing. Uh Norm McDonald wrote one called, I think This Is Not a Memoir. Do you know Norm McDonald, famous Canadian comedian? Yeah, yeah. Turns out the man was an insanely good writer. Probably shouldn't be a surprise because his whole life was telling stories and you know, kind of surprising you by taking it directions you might not have thought it was going. Yeah. And I couldn't recommend any higher. Just picking up the last chapter of that book, you will never. Well, I shouldn't say you will never, but it it it will move you. It's so powerful. You know, it's this it's this um final musings of a man with bowel cancer who was a kind of weird dude, and summing up that, you know, what was the point of it all, basically. And it's just phenomenal. And but it's a very weird book because yeah, they are they're kind of real stories, but they're obviously lies as well. And you're trying to just determine which is Norm's thread here versus him just taking the piss. Is it are you sure the title is This Is Not a Memoir? Uh no, it could it's it says it's not a true story?
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's it. That's it. Okay. And then I think the subtitle is Not a Memoir. Awesome. Okay. I just sorry, I was typing while you were talking. I wanted to make sure I got that on my TBR before I forgot it. It sounds really good.
SPEAKER_01Look, as a guy writing the Times, I think you will I I think you'll definitely get a lot of that. Also the opening to um, oh yeah, you reviewed this book, but um Neil Postman's Amoving ourselves amusing ourselves to death. So the the opening, you know, two or three pages to that is so fucking deep. Yeah. So amazing. Yeah. Anyway, sorry.
SPEAKER_00Um, dude, we could riff on this stuff forever. Oh, I I have I have a last thought on that if if you don't want to segue quite yet. It was just that there are a lot of other topics that I want to write about, and uh and I just sort of have come to decide that like fiction to me is the more interesting way to explore those topics because I I do think fiction can spread wider than nonfiction in certain ways, and at the end of the day, with most nonfiction, you only get one or two lessons out of it. And so if if a book's job is to give like one or two lessons or one or two takeaways, like fiction might actually be better at that. And I think I think we lie to ourselves sometimes that we learn a ton of different things from nonfiction books when the reality is that they kind of just teach you one big thing, if anything.
SPEAKER_01Look, most nonfiction is just masturbation anyway. Yeah, yeah, it's just fun. You know, it's entertainment. It's just fun, it's you know, self-help, it's self-improvement. It makes us feel like we're really going somewhere until you've consumed enough and you just realize I'm the exact same person I was a while ago. Yeah. I just I just I just have maybe a few more mental models to think of, but to the point, absolutely, great fiction will move you and will really influence your worldview, your relationships. Um, it can drive and tie new passions for you that fundamentally change the way you see the world and then live your life. Totally, totally. So you mentioned great stories, but less great writing. Who stands out there? Who do you think just puts together amazing stories, rich characters? And it doesn't just have to be books. You could go into fiction and TV and movies and stuff as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um I mean, I this is like my my annoying highbrow answer to this always is infinite jest. It's just the best book. I mean, it's just un that that book is just so unreal. It's it's worth the slog if you enjoy that kind of thing. I mean, I think, you know, it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but um, but it's not it's weird, you know, it's not like good storytelling, but it it also is good storytelling for what it's trying to do, you know? So it it it kind of it it breaks the mold in such an interesting way, right? And then there's like a subset of that question, which is like what are s what are some books that like do a great job in one area at at the expense of the others? And I was talking about um I was talking about Ayn Rand with a friend yesterday, where like Ayn Rand's not actually a very good writer. The the dialogue is really clunky, the characters are all one-dimensional and kind of cardboardy, but the world is so good and the speeches are so good that it kind of makes up for a lot of the rest of it.
SPEAKER_01Like, no, creates a philosophy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you know, she she gets the ideas across me, she beats you over the head with them, but you kind of enjoy it if it's resonating with you. And you know, that so that's really cool to see. It three body problem is this way too. You know, three body problem is probably like my favorite sci-fi series, where it I mean, it's just incredible. But the characters are pretty flat, you know, they're they're pretty cardboardy. And so you can kind of like get away with a certain amount of that if you, you know, you if you get like really, really incredible in one dimension, you you don't need to have like all of them. And it's actually kind of hard to think like, you know, who does all of them really well, right? I'm just like looking at the bookshelf. You're like, Dune is an insanely cool world, insanely imaginative world when it came out. Yeah. I mean, there was no Star Wars back. So much originality. Yeah, I thought it was rip off a lot of the themes. Oh, yeah. I mean, Star Wars is basically like watered down. I mean, it even starts on a desert planet, right? Yeah, it's been a little more subtle with some of this stuff. Um, but you know, but but it's like it's really boring for the first hundred pages. You know, that's why nobody wanted to publish it. They couldn't get through. You you you had to hear from somebody else who did push through that like you know, it's it's worth it. Worth it. Yeah. Um like, you know, Cormac McCarthy, right? Like his books, they they just have such like insightful, you know, takes on humanity and like the badness in the world, and what it means to like push back against badness in the world, and how it how it can be futile, um but like you know, there there can be truth in evil, like all of these very interesting themes and just the brutality of human nature and the gruesomeness, right? Like Blood Meridian is this wonderful book, and you read it, and it's you're thinking there's no way any human could ever be this savage, could ever be this disgusting. And then you realize it's based on a true story. I mean, it's basically a history book with you know some other details thrown in. Um but you know, but it's really hard to read because he doesn't use dialogue tags.
SPEAKER_01Like you know, you have no idea what's going on sometimes. I just remember so vividly I think the opening scene with the judge when he just walks into a tent uh where there's some impromptu church and with no motivation, no reason, decides to just whip the crowd into a frenzy to murder this priest. And it's it's fucking powerful. It's wild. But to you just said uh sorry if this is too high-branded too like uh eye roly of a question, but you know, where does that come from from Cormac, for instance, those deep insights into humanity and death and and violence? Is it because he just has a singular worldview and through experience has developed this? Or as someone who's just published an entire nonfiction book, not published, sorry, written, you know, do you find yourself discovering the these these themes and these great insights as you're writing it? And so they can always they can almost be forced out, or does it have to come from you, Nat? This is how you see the world, and this is just how you're articulating it?
SPEAKER_00I think it's the latter. I think that every writer has at root like one or two ideas, and those ideas just keep manifesting.
SPEAKER_01What are your big ideas? Um you can think about it. So if Rand is the great man, if Cormac is uh violence is actually just a part of humanity, there's no getting away from it, there's no morality. If I don't know, if uh Lord of the Rings is the you know the the power of the journey, like what's Nat's big idea?
SPEAKER_00Mine I I think really comes back to this like I'm just fascinated by this eternal struggle between our presumption of rationality and our animal nature. And I think that that duality is at the root of just like so much religion, philosophy, challenges in like interpersonal relationships, challenges in like internal relationships, you know, with ourselves, and you know, it's a source of like some you know self-loathing and a lot of these like challenging emotions, and it's obviously a question that has no answer because we've been struggling with it forever. And so, how do we operate as best we can knowing that we are not fully or even partially maybe in the driver's seat? Right. And how do we become comfortable with that? Uh and you know, crypto confidential really touches on that theme because it's like there's this strong desire to be smart and intentional and focused and diligent, and then that just keeps getting sidetracked by you know greed and ambition and FOMO and all of these like emotions. And I think you see, you know, the rise of certain ideas like stoicism, right? I mean, I really enjoy stoic writing, I really enjoy letters from a stoic and Marcus Aurelius, but it's also just a very flawed religion because philosophy, you know, it's it's become a religion because it's like the whole thing is preserved, the whole thing is based on the idea that you can will you your your will is stronger than your animal nature, and you can kind of like overcome that. And I just think that that's fundamentally wrong. You know, it's just not true. And you need to figure out some better relationship with yourself than like, oh, well, being sad doesn't make sense, so you should just stop being sad, right? It's like that doesn't actually work. It sounds nice, it looks great on a tweet. It's temporary, yeah. But there's a reason that like a lot of the big stoic influencers kind of are like assholes or you know, seem like pretty reactionary people, and like they, you know, they they don't seem to practice what they preach very much. I think it's a very attractive philosophy to people who struggle with that relationship between their desire to follow a checklist and a spreadsheet and the truth that you just can't do that. I think the whole like nonfiction market is built on this too. You know, we think that we can read a book on how to, you know, create better habits or lose weight or uh any of these things, but that you know, there's how many diet books published per year, and obesity keeps going up, right? Like that is clearly not the answer, but it's a very attractive answer. And so the real question to me is like, okay, how much control do we actually have and how do we live with that knowledge?
SPEAKER_01Um, you can really tell Taleb has rubbed off on you quite a lot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, Taleb is a really you know I think he's really interesting in this regard. He he's very honest about it. Um and I mean the the more interesting thing about Taleb is just what a flawed person he clearly is, right? Because there's you know, there there is this wonderful article called A Tale of Two Talebs that I think is like mandatory reading for anyone who's a big Taleb fan. And what it does a great job of, and it opens with like, you know, Taleb is one of the best nonfiction writers of our generation. His books are incredible, they're among my favorite books, and the person Taleb is online and you know, supposedly behind closed doors and stuff, is very divided from you know what's espoused in these books. And that's an interesting challenge too, right? Is that like nobody nobody is who they want to be. And we have to accept that in other people and not expect it. And we also have to accept it in ourselves.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. So how are you expressing these ideas? Is it is it through the character development, or do you rely on dialogue to communicate these messages?
SPEAKER_00It I think it would depend on the book. You know, the the one I'm working on. Take the sci-fi one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So the the sci-fi novel is, you know, so so one consideration when you're starting to write fiction is like, what market do you want this to appeal to? Because you could write very prosy short stories that are deeply loved by a few hundred or a few thousand people, but never have much commercial appeal. And the the route that I've decided to take, at least for now, is I want to write like mass market fiction. You know, the I want it to be like on the bookshelf next to Andy Weir or Pierce Brown, right? It's like that's the level I'm going for. And so it has to be an exciting, digestible, fast-paced story that could bring in that many people. So then the question is, within that rapper, you know, how does this idea fit in? And the the core the core idea of the book that I'm working on is can you actually separate your mind from your body? Is is the mind, is consciousness this layer that sits on top that is, you know, driving in life, or is it as much in your heart and your nervous system as it is in your brain? And it's just this fully embodied thing. Because which of those you believe actually dictates a lot of your philosophy around you know, technology and food, and like all of these other things that are going to become bigger and bigger questions in the future, right? And especially with AI and a lot of these topics, the the philosophy of mind has gotten a lot more interesting than it was 20 years ago. So, you know, I studied philosophy in college. You know, I I love reading that stuff. Um, and this is very much a an exploration of philosophy of mind wrapped in a fast-paced, action-packed, like sci-fi novel. And that's a fun challenge too, because I want to go, you know, I want to go on like a 2000-word, you know, like side quest to talk about like the Chinese room. And, you know, how do we ever know that there's like another mind on the other room? But like you can't go that hard. And so how do you like take that idea and put it into a 250-word paragraph to just like lightly touch on it in a way that is gonna like, you know, maybe open that door a little bit in some people's mind, but isn't going to slow down the reading too much. It's a fun challenge.
SPEAKER_01But it must be so fulfilling when you're totally in it and then grappling with that challenge. Yeah. And producing something that, you know, this could work. I can definitely improve this over time. Yeah, yeah. Just imagine uh projecting onto that experience, it must feel like a day uh well lived.
SPEAKER_00Totally. It it is, and it's it's such a fun challenge. I mean, there's one chapter about two-thirds of the way through the book where that question really like comes to a head. And in the in the draft that I last sent out to people, that chapter was like 5,000 words. So it's about a 40-page chapter. It would probably take you 20, 30 minutes to read. It's long, right? And it's there's there's some action, but it's mostly dialogue. And so the the main feedback I got was like, there's just it's too much, right? It's too heavy, it slows down the pace too much. And so most of what I was working on yesterday when I managed to get some work done was condensing that. And I managed to get it down to 3,800 from 5,000 while keeping all of the core ideas. And so, you know, it's like 25% improvement. That's pretty meaningful, and that's like a really big win to me. And again, a fun challenge because you I can look at it, you say, okay, we don't need this detail, we don't need this detail. Like, what am I putting in there for me versus what should be in there for the reader? Right. Steve Stephen King has this um good little equipment on writing where he says the first draft is for you and the second draft is for the world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so you've got to take all of the like you, the things that are in there for you out so that other people can like it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Something that stood out to me from Crypto Confidential was that it all happens in a nine-month time frame. Yeah. And I couldn't help but thinking, you know, does Nat feel like he'll ever have so much like in such a short time period again? Because you live so big in those nine months. Yeah. For all the downs, but all the highs, too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. It yeah, I mean, that was one of the crazy things looking back at it was just how condensed a lot of it was. And I mean, really, the story started in January. It picks up in May in the book, and there was like four months of stuff that I just cut because it was kind of boring and condensed a lot of it into the first chapter. You know, I just had to like pull some things forward for the sake of the story. But even if it's January to the next May, that's 15 months, 16 months, that's not very long to go from yeah. I mean, to go to go from okay, I'm day trading a thousand dollars of doge on my phone to like there's over a hundred million dollars on the line that hackers might be about to steal. You know, it's just like that's insane. And no, I I really don't want that to happen again. Like it's just you know the the the emotional tax, the the time and energy and attention. We were just so I was just so in the maelstrom. Like I'm pretty happy if that doesn't happen again. But that's also a consideration for writing books, because like I might not ever have a nonfiction book like that again, because I just probably won't have another story quite like that. But I'm okay with that. I I don't I don't need it.
SPEAKER_01So you're super open with your publishing numbers. I read in um a newsletter from you, I think it was a few months ago now, at least. But basically the summation is that yes, if you can repay the advance, then you're already one of the best books of the year, but then she's one of the best books ever. Top two, three percent. Can you just talk about how insanely skewed the market for book publishing is?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It it's pretty wild. You know, books, book publishers are basically like venture capitalists. So they will, you know, there there's a big, there's the big publisher like Penguin Random House, and then Penguin Random House has 20 or 30 imprints under it, which are like sub-publishers that focus on specific areas. So the public the imprint that I worked with was Portfolio, which is part of Penguin Random House, and Portfolio publishes about 35 books a year. Of those 35, they probably only expect like three or six of them to become big winners. You know, there'll be like 10% that pay back the whole year. There'll be another 10 or 20% that like earn out their advance and like do okay. And then there might be another 50, 60% that don't repay their investment. And so they're, you know, they want every book to repay its investment, but there's also some expectation that many of them won't. And it really is this uh yeah, this like venture capital game. Because the other thing publishers have is they have a back catalog. They they've published hundreds and hundreds of books over the years, and a lot of those books are still selling. You think about like how to win friends and influence people that came out in the 70s, right? And it still sells a few hundred thousand copies a year. Like it's insane. You know, that just keeps printing money, right? Or Penguin Random House has all the Penguin classics. And so they're still selling Brothers K. They're still selling you know, Jane Eyre, they're still selling The Odyssey's. Yeah, the Odyssey. I mean, gosh, right? Like they're making so much money off of all those books, they don't need every new book to you know be the big winner. And the other crazy thing is that publishers often don't make as much money on the big advances and the big deals. You know, the if they give a million dollar advance to an influencer, they might not make that money back. But if they find the next You know, the next Colleen Hoover, who's completely unknown, but they get her first book for $50,000, and then that book sells two million copies next year, their ROI is just insane, right? So those are those are kind of like the deals where they end up making the most money, are the small to mid advances that just you know blow it out of the water. And so it it is this weird relationship as an author, because if if your book does extremely well, a publisher can make sure it keeps doing well. They'll do ads on it, they'll push it to bookstores, they'll get more and more copies going. But if your book doesn't hit that escape velocity, they'll basically just drop it and move on because it's not worth their time to put any attention to it. You know, like why would they spend money on ads for your book that's not selling well if they could spend money on ads for how to win friends and influence people, right? And so that's that's definitely a challenge with it. Is it, you know, they're they're almost like uh an accelerant. If it's going well, they can make it go better. If it's not going well, you're sort of on your own. And um, and then there's the whole advanced part, right? Which is they'll give you a certain amount for the book. So I got a 275k advance for crypto confidential, which is incredible. I mean, that's a really huge, right?
SPEAKER_01For a first-time author. Is that because you had a big audience that you could email list? Email list is the big thing they look at. Are you willing to say how many email subscribers you had when you got that advance?
SPEAKER_00I had 35,000, and then I had a deal with the publication every dot two, the every newsletter, where I was writing stuff for them. And so that gave me another 50,000 emails I could promote too. Amazing. So that was like the main thing in my proposal was like, hey, I have 35,000, I have another 50,000, 85,000 people, and they can you know back the napkin math. They can say, okay, well, we would expect at least 8,000 of those people to buy the book. And if we're selling it for 30, okay, that's $240,000 top line, like just off the email list. And then, you know, you apply some like multiple for virality to that. So maybe this book is going to sell a million dollars over five years. So we'll give you a 275k advance. You know, it's like they've got their whole calculus for it. Yeah. Um, but it's also, you know, they're also giving you the advance because they want you to do three, four, five books with them, and they want to like get you early if you're a promising up-and-coming author. Um, or they don't want somebody else to get the next James Clear or Mark Manson book. Or, you know, it's like there, there's all these other elements that are going into it. But yeah, 275k is like top 1% or top 5% of advances that go out in a year. Um so that's like a home run. But then if you're in a situation like where Crypto Confidential is now, it's sold probably like four or five thousand copies, and it needs to sell probably 70 to 80,000 copies to earn back the advance. So it might not earn it back. Like it's possible. Like we'll see what happens with this bull run. It could just take off, it could be, you know, it like there's a world where it becomes like the book for this cycle that like everybody interested in crypto is buying. And that's why I really hope so too. And in that case, it'll probably earn it back. But if that doesn't happen, it it just might never earn back the advance. So then they've lost money on on the book potentially, um, which I feel bad about. But that's also the benefit of working with a publisher, is to pay back the advance. Yeah. Exactly. Like you have that money either way.
SPEAKER_01To continue the venture capital example, at least when I'm pitching a business to a venture capitalist, there are a lot of uh touch points they can refer to. What's the market going for? What does your competition look like? What's your track record? Who's the talent you've hired? Like there are leading indicators for actually is this a good bet to make or not? And I imagine with book publishing, especially for a first timer, there's almost no leading indicator. It really is a toss of the coin, and there's so many great examples of it. Famously, J.K. Rowling was denied um multiple times, I think more than 20 times, and then Bloomsbury, this upstart, one of the first books they ever published, turns out it's the greatest selling fiction book of all time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, the so the question underneath that is is there any predictability, or is it just good old-fashioned luck and randomness that propels you into the hundreds of thousands?
SPEAKER_00There's definitely some predictability, uh, in the sense of, you know, we'll use James Clear as an example. He'd been blogging for eight or nine years at that point about habits. He had the biggest blog about habits on the internet. He had, I think, a couple hundred thousand people on his email list at that point. And so they could feel reasonably confident that he could sell a book on habits, right? Now, could they have predicted that it would sell 20 million copies? No way, right? I mean, just insane success. But it wouldn't have been unreasonable for them to give him like a million dollar advance because at 30 bucks a pop and a publisher makes call it like 30% per copy, like they only have to sell 100,000 copies to at least earn back that investment, maybe 200,000 with like production costs and things like that. That's not that many books for somebody with that size of an audience. And so it's like kind of de-risked in that sense. My deal was actually riskier for portfolio because I've written about so many things over the years. You know, it's like I was number one on Google for how to last longer in bed a few years ago, right? And it's like, then there's entrepreneurship and there's productivity and then there's crypto. You know, there's like all these topics. And the the thing that I think we were all surprised by was that like a lot of my audience just wasn't that interested in a crypto book. And I thought more of them would be. I think more of them are now, now the market's back. It's like, oh, okay, like now you're curious. But during launch, they weren't as interested. And so my conversion from my emails was way lower than we would have hoped for. So there is that element of like, you know, randomness too. And you'll you will you will see sometimes people are like, you know, they blog a lot about productivity and they have a big productivity audience, and then they write a book about productivity, and like people aren't interested in it for whatever reason, right? So it's hard to say what causes that mismatch. It could just be right book, right time. It could be, you know, how tapped out the topic is, it could be how good of a writer they are. You know, some people are great at short articles and tweets and the like punchy format, but it kind of like falls apart when they have to do 60,000 words. Yeah, right. It's a totally different style of writing.
SPEAKER_01It makes me think of uh James Smith, uh this guy he's uh British lives in Australia, and he's basically a personal trainer influencer. And he very he's a a master at social media and building audiences. I would I would estimate hundreds of thousands of newsletter subscribers, paid courses, millions of Instagram, everything. So he's just got this massive audience. But he did this incredible thing about three or four months ago, which I've been watching closely. In about a year, he went from zero to five hundred thousand YouTube um subscribers. And then he released a product with Chris Williamson, this new tonic drink. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then um basically not many people bought it from his audience. Maybe Chris was doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, and he just got was being called a sellout, and you know, why would you do this? And then he just did this really interesting thing where he sort of let that YouTube channel die, started a new one, and explained why. Just basically I had this huge audience, but only one or two percent of them were there for what I wanted to talk about. And I just fell into the trap of doing the things that I knew would gain subscribers and clicks. And so you have a very sort of disloyal fan base at that stage, not say disloyal, but you know, not interested in your core message, yeah. Right. And therefore, it is probably the case that for just um audience as a leading indicator can be a big red herring. Rather, it's like dude.
SPEAKER_00I I I mean, I had the same thing where uh while I was working on Crypto Confidential, I started a book talk and a bookstagram doing like book reviews and book recommendations, and I blew it up to like just shy of 200,000 followers on Instagram in like six or eight months, and there was almost no conversion from that to book sales. It was like insane, what basically a huge waste of time because the they weren't interested in me, they didn't care about me. Like I was not really much of a character in their lives. I was just like doing these book recks.
SPEAKER_01That is called a curation of books, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And they and they wanted like very specifically self-help nonfiction. You know, they they wanted the book that would let them build a business, the book that would, you know, uh get them to wake up early. They didn't want this like book about crypto, and I think it actually would have been better if I had built an audience of 5,000 people who were super interested in in me and in crypto confidential and had just tried to sell to them. And this has actually been a big change in my thinking in the last couple of months where I I don't really care about getting a big email list or a big Twitter following or a big following in general. I just want to be like basically a hundred percent myself and have a few thousand people who are like really there for me and really interested in like me and what I'm doing because they'll they'll buy the book. You know, they'll be the ones who will be like, yeah, I want to try a sci-fi novel from now. Like that sounds cool. Um, but if I'm just building an audience of like people who like sci-fi, then like maybe that'll pay off in the short term, but in the long term, they won't be interested in whatever the next thing is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, totally, totally. Did you notice podcasts move the needle at all when it came to book sales?
SPEAKER_00It's hard to say. I did a lot of them and I did a decent number of big ones. I think podcasts probably moved the needle a little bit more than like traditional media, um, and probably a little bit more than like Twitter blasts. It's hard, but it's really hard to say though. You know, it's I can't track this stuff.
SPEAKER_01You can't really. So you don't notice. Um, what's the biggest show you did?
SPEAKER_00The biggest show I did was Ali Abdahl.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00Deep Dive.
SPEAKER_01So he's got five, six million subscribers.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, 500,000 on the podcast on YouTube. And then, you know, he syndicates it out. So, like there could have been, you know, at least tens of thousands of listeners to that episode. Um, no noticeable movement on book sales.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. That's fascinating. I I I ask a lot of people, mostly my guests are journalists, um, especially those that have written books. And obviously, if you're writing narrow niche journalism, it's a much harder market to penetrate, even though they are some of the most valuable books written every year. Um and I'm really keen on, you know, following like which show did you do which actually moved the needle when you came on here? Did you notice any spike? Um, and it's interesting, there are some shows that really move the needle, and then some shows that are huge that it seemingly doesn't move the needle. And it could be coming back to this same thing of like, who is the audience? What are they there for?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think that's really true. I the where I've landed now is that I think doing podcasts is worthwhile mostly to hang out with the host, because it's like anybody who has a podcast is like probably the kind of person in their friend group who is a little bit ahead of the trends and who is like finding interesting things and talking about it. And they're they're have they have some degree of influence in that sense, and so even if the podcast itself isn't moving tons of books, like being on that person's radar and like them enjoying it and them talking about it, that's probably the thing that's very valuable. Um and but yeah, it's like it's really it's so hard to attribute. I mean, I haven't seen any crazy out-of-the-blue spikes from any podcast. And I I've heard that from other authors too, like people who go on the biggest podcast, you know, like team. Yeah. And then they say, like, yeah, it sold some books, right, but not nearly as much as they expected.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Uh it's it's interesting. I don't know. I feel like um everything we're saying is just reinforcing the core idea that there's just so much luck and randomness in all of this, and all you can do is just produce the best thing possible and hope that it takes, you know.
SPEAKER_00I I think it's I think word of mouth is most of marketing, like much more than we want to admit. And a lot of what the podcasts do is they give you like extra blips on someone's radar. And so I I think that hardly anybody listens to a podcast and then whips out their phone and goes to Amazon and buys a book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But you and I are talking about crypto confidential, and then maybe somebody like sees it on Amazon later, and then they hear about it from a friend, and then you know, something happens in the crypto news, and then they're like, I should go read that book, and like then they go buy it, right? But there, I think that it's very helpful in that regard, um, and less of a like direct, immediate attribution sense.
SPEAKER_01I think the they're incredible vehicles for serendipity. Now, you've obviously published a book which introduces so much serendipity into your life, but appearing on shows like David Perel, for instance, must surely open the door to unforeseen far down the line, who's to say that you can connect it to it, but it's a moment of serendipity that's been introduced to your life, and the upside from that is impossible to say.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's absolutely true. It's just crazy what putting yourself out there does for you. I I mean, I had this wild example this week where on Monday I decided, like, okay, I'm going to start talking about crypto stuff again because I want the book to do well, and people should read it if this cryptomania is coming. So I put my CryptoPunk Avatar back on Twitter and I blasted out this tweet saying that I'm taking a break from my mental health to focus on crypto. And, you know, people thought that was hilarious and were liking it and retweeting it and whatever. And then by the end of the day, I get a DM from a journalist at the Washington Post who's writing a story about retail money coming back into crypto. And she's like, Hey, I saw your tweet and laughed, and I just was curious if you wanted to chat, you know, and then saw you had this book. And so we got on the phone that night and talked for like 20 minutes about what's going on in the crypto market. And she's writing a story um for like the WAPO tech section. She's gonna like mention me in the book, and it's like, that's awesome.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. That's absolutely awesome.
SPEAKER_00Portfolio wasn't able to get me those kinds of opportunities when the book launched, but me just like sending out a stupid tweet got Washington Post, and like I'm doing you know, another podcast after this, same thing. There's just like somebody at uh you know, a publication saw it and wanted to chat. And it's like, you just never know. You kind of just need to like do more stuff and put more stuff out there because it'll be a random thing that ends up paying off. I the there's a another story I love from um I'm pretty sure this is from Michael Easter. He wrote the book The Comfort Crisis, which is a great book, and he went on a really unknown small hunting podcast to talk about it.
SPEAKER_01Nice.
SPEAKER_00And it just so happened that Joe Rogan listened to that podcast and because you know he was just interested in bow hunting. And so Rogan heard Easter's interview on this bow hunting podcast and invited him to come on Joe Rogan. Yep. And then the book just exploded from there, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So now he's no two books are absolutely guaranteed. No, it's incredible. It's a fantastic example of the serendipity that can come into your life. Totally. So there's a nice line in the book, um, which at least resonated with me about how the skeptics overplay the criminal use of crypto while the believers underplay it. Uh where do you come down on it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I mean the the biggest facilitator of criminal activity in the world is the US dollar, right? Is cash. You know, but that doesn't mean that we should get rid of cash. But obviously criminals use cash, you know, and and crypto's kind of the same. It's like the the thing that's unique in crypto is that you can find a vulnerability and exploit it for a hundred million dollars, and you can tumble that money relatively quickly and you can get away with it. And so it it has some of the biggest honey pots in the world, so you shouldn't be surprised that people are going to go after them. Um and I think that crypto people are like overly sensitive to the criminal accusations because in the beginning that like was the main use, you know. Nobody was using Bitcoin, nobody's putting Bitcoin in their 401k, but you could use it to buy Molly, you know, like that was the only thing you could use it for for a while, and like shall okay, that's how it started, but that's not what it is today, right? And I I think I think too that there is this like snooty, holier than thou, know-it-all, like journalist class that is always late to tech trends. And they they need to like make themselves feel better for missing out on things, and so they're very eager to like criticize and condemn and make fun of stuff.
SPEAKER_01Um I see and that's pretty snarky though, Nath, you know, because like we have even though the USD may be the biggest um facilitator of crime in the world, it's also a thousand, two thousand eggs bigger than the it's incomprehensibly larger than than crypto. And we've set up all these mechanisms to limit the criminal use cases of USD. Whereas, you know, I'm sh I don't need to tell you, but what's happening with Tether and facilitating all types of organized crime around the world. Um the journalists aren't totally wrong when they like to point that out.
SPEAKER_00No, no, that no, they're not totally wrong. I just think that the you know, the whole like, oh, it was a scam all along, the whole thing is a Ponzi, like it's going to zero. That's cheap. You know, like those takes, right? It's like there's definitely criminal stuff that goes on, right? And it's just frustrating to me when you just see all of those stories and you don't see the stories about like all the entrepreneurs in Africa who can't trust their government's currency, and so they build businesses and then immediately convert their profits into Bitcoin, and that's like facilitating this massive economic growth in these regions of Africa where they just like can't trust their dollar or their husband stability. Yeah, yeah, there's no stability in Argentina, right? This was the one of the cool things about working in crypto was I met all of these people who lived in Argentina and elsewhere where they couldn't trust the currency, and so they would get paid and then immediately convert it to USDC. And, you know, they got dollar exposure in a way they never could in their local in their country, and they got it for like significantly lower fees than they could have if they tried to get like actual dollars. You know, it's like for every bad thing that's happening, there's 10, 20, 100 good things happening, and those just haven't gotten the same press. And it is nice to see that tide shifting. I think really this cycle and with the new administration in the US, it's just like a tidal wave of okay, this is happening. Like BlackRock has hundreds of millions of dollars on chain. You know, they've been building their own smart contracts on Ethereum. Like they want to tokenize the stock market. It's just like you literally the moon. Yeah, the wildest dreams of crypto people from four years ago are actually happening.
SPEAKER_01So then do you think it's just it's just downstream? The same regulations that we put on fiat currencies to limit its criminal uses will come to crypto, or is there something at the core of the crypto ideology, the pure libertarian view that it will resist those um you know, that cupping?
SPEAKER_00No, no, no. I mean, those controls are already there in a lot of ways, right? So Bitcoin you can't really do illegal activity with because there's no way to tumble it. And I mean, you you'd have to off-ramp it in a foreign country, you know, it'd just be it'd be very inconvenient. And you can do some illegal stuff with tether, but tether has controls built into it. If if if if you steal a bunch of crypto and convert it to tether, tether can actually freeze the tether in your account. They can take it away from you. And USDC has the same function built into it. If the government, if the US government decides that somebody has like illegally stolen this USDC, then they'll freeze it, you know, they'll they'll take it away from you. And so you can use uh, you know, totally decentralized stable coins, right? You could use DAI or something, but it doesn't have the same security that like a USDC does, because every USDC is backed one to one by US treasuries and dollars. And so it's just going to be this trade off, right? Like, do you want to use the currency that's the safest, but you have to follow US laws? Or Do you want to do something shady and use something with like more risk and more volatility? And I think that's just where it's going to go. But in general, the legal version is going to win out because more capital is going to flow to it. Kind of like what we saw with music streaming, right? Like going after Napster didn't really work. Like torrenting still exists. You can still torrent music. What worked was building Spotify.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Right. What worked was making a legal version of this that was way more compelling than the illegal version. Yeah. And I think we're just going to see the same thing in crypto. Like people are going to use the legalized protected chains and currencies for that security. And because they're going to have so much more money behind them, um, that you can trust them better.
SPEAKER_01So we're just in the early iterations and getting over the ugly speed bumps towards okay. How ideological about crypto uh were you and also are you? Uh is it the libertarian dream to refigure society or more of a cynical money money-making opportunity?
SPEAKER_00I wouldn't really, I guess I wouldn't put myself in either of those buckets. I think it's just the next stage of finance. I I definitely don't agree that we're going to like definancialize the world, you know, that we're going to like get rid of derivatives and nobody's going to be gambling on stocks and things anymore. Like, no, the stock market is going to come on chain. There's going to be all these new financial assets that we can't even think about right now because they haven't been possible. The dollar's not going away. The dollar is still going to be the dominant currency for a while, but there are going to be these other options now. Like Bitcoin is definitely a better store of value than gold in the sense of like it's more volatile. I'm not saying it's not volatile, but technologically and logistically, it's just a better tool for that goal. And so it really wouldn't surprise me if Bitcoin flips gold sometime in the next five to ten years. Uh, because I think it's just better for that. And USDC is going to be probably the main way that we like move dollars around instead of ACH and wire transfers, which are just like awful technologies. But we're not going to replace the dollar with bitcoins, right? And I don't think there's going to be like some major restructuring. I don't think we're going to like create new nation states that just run on Bitcoin, right? Because like uh just when when like a two-cause it's volatility. No, just because that's not really what people value once they start having families and things, right? It's like, yeah, if you're a 22-year-old who spends all your day on spends all day on the computer and like hasn't touched a girl in six months, then yeah, you're like, we're all moving to Africa and like buying up a country and you know, we're gonna build skyscrapers and stuff, but then like, you know, people who want, you know, community and you know, stability and to be near their families and to, you know, all of those things, they're not gonna move there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Life kicks in really quickly. So I I think the boring answer is the most likely one, which is that this is just the next stage of the like internet era of finance, and it's going to make a lot of things easier and it's going to open up access and it's going to increase the uh penetration of the dollar around the world considerably, because most countries will no longer have a reason to have a local currency anymore, because everybody, all of their constituents will just want to use dollars, and they will just use dollars because they'll have immediate access to them. I mean, it's actually insane that you could be living in like sub-Saharan Africa, you could, you know, take your paycheck, you could buy USDC with it, and then you could convert it to US Treasuries, and you could do all of that for like a fraction of a cent. And then you're just holding treasuries. Like that's your savings account. You could you couldn't do that five years ago.
SPEAKER_01No, it's absolutely insane. Uh and I I I do get swept up in those um optimistic futures as well when I hear it. Um, but I think at least from my own experience, reading Zeke Fowl's book um number go up, it you know, I mean, it's good to get both sides of the um but both perspectives rather. What role actually does crypto have in society? Is it a net good?
SPEAKER_00I I think the big the the one thing I like worry about a little bit is the gambling economy because every year we're just spending more of our time and more of our money gambling.
SPEAKER_01Grim.
SPEAKER_00You know, like FanDuel and DraftKings have taken over sports in the US than we saw with the election. There was something like six billion dollars in total volume across all of the betting markets on the election. And that trend isn't stopping.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00And crypto is going to make it a lot easier. I mean, you know, everything in crypto with meme coins right now, there's you're seeing it game applies.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, the the peanut the squirrel thing happened. Did did you see this story? I I didn't follow it close enough. The two Sundays ago, these uh police officers in New York broke into a family's house and took their pet squirrel and raccoon and killed them because they were like, you know, illegal pets. But the squirrel and raccoon were like TikTok influencers. They had this huge falling on TikTok. And so the family made all these videos. You know, they showed the police like breaking into their house and doing all this. And I mean, the internet just like lost its mind, I think reasonably, because at least in the US, you have this frustration that the police state isn't doing anything about the crazy illegal immigration, but they do have time to go like kill somebody's pet squirrel, right? It's like, how does that make any sense? But you know, the the politics of it aside, the minute that happened, somebody launched a peanut meme coin. And by the end of the day, it had hit $100 million. And yesterday it got listed on Binance, you know, one of the big crypto exchanges, and now it's worth $1.5 billion. There were people who bought the peanut meme coin at $10 million on Sunday, who are up $150 in 10 days. And so you see that and you go, maybe I should be paying more attention to crypto, right? Like, why am I working at my desk job? Somebody just turned $1,000 into $150k, right? Like this is stupid. I should just be gambling. And that worries me. Yeah. I don't know how that ends.
SPEAKER_01That's an incredible anecdote, one which is littered throughout crypto confidential just with different names and dates. Totally. Yeah, on the on the gambling thing, you can look to Australia as a um, I think a pretty good example. I think per capita we're the biggest gamblers in the world. Really? Uh yeah. So you can gamble, but you can't smoke. Uh well no, we can smoke, it's just cost a shitload of money. Okay. Um but basically there's a whole thing and the gamification of slot machines, you know? Yeah. Which I think a lot of that same psychology is applied to the gamification of these brokers and trading houses and so forth.
SPEAKER_00Robinhood is basically a slot machine.
SPEAKER_01It's, you know, like who who are you or I to limit someone's um vices? You know, we all drink, some of us smoke, some of us take drugs, some of us gamble. Um, but addiction's a real thing, and uh gambling destroys people. Uh it really does. There But then it's a there's been some it kind of it becomes a libertarian thing. It's like, you know, do we who are we to say no, you've done too much, stop.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah. I I I really struggle, I really struggle with those questions because I definitely fall into the more libertarian camp of we should let people do what they want. And there there's some data that's come out that in states that legalize sports betting in the US, 401k contributions drop by 20 to 30 percent the next year. Wow. Wow. And so that's bad, you know. Like I don't like, yeah, but do you, you know, do you ban it again? I don't know. Like I'm thinking about this a lot with um the the new administration, right? And with um RFK coming in and trying to like clean up the food supply and the food system. And you know, in in America, there are all of these food additives that are illegal in the rest of the world for good reason. And I'm very much in favor of banning most of them from the food supply. And it is this kind of thing where it's like, hey, if somebody wants to like fill their body with soybean oil, you know, should they be allowed to do that? Like maybe, but it it's tough, right? Like, I mean, it it's this is kind of like you know, classic play-doh the the ideal ruler is a philosopher king, yeah, right? You want somebody with all the right ideas and unlimited power because that will create the best society, but you put the slightly wrong person in that position and things get really bad really quickly. Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we we haven't quite figured out the right way one to an elect a leader democratically, um nor can we identify who the good philosopher king was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what what's what's the Churchill line? Like democracy is the democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried. Man, that guy was a goat. Have a look at it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Oh. Is it is it good? Is it like aphorisms? It's it's decent. It's decent. So I I I read um Andrew Roberts' biography of him. Okay. Uh after all the Martha May, Churchill was the chief villain of World War II star. Yeah. I thought, okay, that's a bit edgy. But Andrew Roberts' book is just absolutely phenomenal. This guy, Winston Churchill, you know, forget morality, right or wrong, just as a life lived, is insanely epic. Um, but he was a super prolific writer.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01He was he was one of the journalists, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. So so he started off as a war correspondent. He became one of Britain's best known journalists and sort of foreign correspondents. Um, and then, you know, politics took over his life. But anyway, he wrote millions and millions and millions of words and uh naturally became very pithy. And this book is like a compilation of his best whists and aphorisms. Cool. It's decent. I mean, as an author, it might be worth having on the desk to lean over to occasionally. You need to throw in a quotation. Just change a word here or there. One of your characters can be super. There we go. Um, but now look, we're we're coming up on the end of our time. And um, I know that it's been a little a little bit inconsistent going between writing and crypto. Um, I do have more questions about Taleb, but I think we kind of addressed that. Um so rather I want to leave by just asking who is your Mount Rushmore for authors, non-fiction, and not because of how many they sold, just because of how epic the words they put down to it.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. I mean, half statter is definitely the first one that comes to mind. And I'll go ahead and put Taleb Taleb in there too. I think he still makes that cut for me. Um Montana for sure. Oh, Ernest Becker comes to mind, Denial of Death. Oh, you know, um, John Gray. I'm gonna put John Gray. Never heard of air. Yeah, uh, start with um Straw Dogs. Nice.
SPEAKER_01Straw Dogs is really good. Nat before I close it up, anything important that you wanted to say that I didn't ask? No, we covered a lot of really fun ground. This is a great conversation. Uh awesome, mate. Well then in very timely and prophetic words, for which you close the book with, I'll see you in the next bull run. See you in the next bull run. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, mate.