#16: Tim Boucher on How to Mint NFTs

Tim Boucher is an author, crypto artist and the Founder of Lost Books, a blockchain publisher.

In this conversation, we discuss:
- How to mint NFTs
- Publishing books as NFTs
- Tim's book "The Lost Direction"
- Rarible vs. OpenSea
- How to use MetaMask
- Mastering your creative process

Website: lostbooks.ca
Twitter: @tphlat
NFT: The Lost Direction NFT

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Transcript

Matt Zahab: 0:01

Ladies and gentlemen, before we get into today's episode I want to talk about Nhash cloud mining. They are a really cool company that makes cryptocurrency mining an easy, smart and rewarding experience for everybody. I've started using these guys it's an absolute treat, very easy to use highly recommend. Nhash has emerged onto the scene as one of the top tier crypto mining platforms. They have years of experience offer tons of computing power, so you can mined Bitcoin Ethereum, Litecoin, and more you name it they offer it. Nhash offers some of the most affordable price in the business ensuring users can begin mining without a large capital outlay for as low as 70 bucks, you can start dance and enrollment and you can start mining today with zero maintenance fees and returns upwards of $5,000. Share your referral code with friends and family to multiply your gains and expand your network. Nhash is currently running a promotion that gets you a $30 off coupon and a $5 bonus for joining. It's literally the best way to join the crypto mining revolution. There is no better way to get around to this I head on over to Nhash.io. That is nhash.io. Highly recommend giving them a try. Now boys and girls, let's get on to the show. Ladies and gentlemen, today's guest is a Canadian digital artist and author that's currently helping other writers and artists move their work to the blockchain. He founded Lost books, an indie blockchain publisher located in Quebec, Canada. This gentleman released his first book in 2020, called The Lost direction, which is the first of the lost books of Kwatra series. I'm very pleased to welcome to the cryptonews podcast, Tim Boucher. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Boucher: 1:53

Hi, thanks for having me. Very pumped to have you on. Always good to have Canadians on. I believe you are Canadian number two, and the first French Canadian on the pod. Bonjour. I'm also secretly an American.

Matt Zahab: 2:08

I saw that when I was doing a little research. You have some lineage in California, right?

Tim Boucher: 2:13

Well, I lived here a little while in California, but I grew up on the east coast in the northeast. I was born in Massachusetts, my family, going back several generations is French Canadian. I came up here about 10 years ago, and ended up staying. And I'm very happy with that choice.

Matt Zahab: 2:32

Nice. I assume very happy with that choice minus the last, you know, 12 months, 13 months kind of thing with COVID.

Tim Boucher: 2:40

Yeah it's been a challenging time period, for sure. For everybody, no matter where you are.

Matt Zahab: 2:45

It certainly has. So you've done something really interesting and when cryptonews first had the opportunity to speak with you on this podcast, it was so unique because it's such a niche. You took a book that was published, you know, the traditional paper publishing route, which I'm assuming is an absolute show and a bit of a nightmare, which we will get into shortly. But you took that book and you published it on the blockchain, and you released it in the form of NFT. It's done very well since. You've also published some of your art on the blockchain, and you founded a company called Lost books, which is an indie blockchain publisher, and you're helping other authors, mostly smaller authors get their books and their art in the form of blockchain on to NFTs, which, again, is just incredible. And I'd love to learn a little bit more about that. But before we do, tell me how you got into the crypto space?

Tim Boucher: 3:37

Sure. Well, I had been working for conventional web platforms for about, I guess, five years or so. And then I started to transition last year into working more for blockchain companies and doing kind of parallel work and transitioning what I had learned at conventional platforms and figuring out how can that technology work in this new space with all of these new opportunities. So that's, I've had a really good luxury to learn and earn at the same time. Just to kind of really explore and find out what's out there and what I can make work for myself for now. And then seeing what I can share from those learnings with other people.

Matt Zahab: 4:25

That's a great line I can learn and earn.

Tim Boucher: 4:29

It's a lucky position to be in for sure.

Matt Zahab: 4:31

That's an author line right there. I can tell you

Tim Boucher: 4:33

Sure. So the book is called The Lost Direction. got a writing background. That's, I love that I'm gonna snag that one myself. So let's get into it. Tell me about the book. Now, the book is called The Lost Direction, and it is a collection of the Kwatrian lore inspired by the little known writings of one Edward Allen Oxford, who is a world war one Merchant Marine, and I will let you finish that sentence off and you can tell us about the mysterious tropical island following U boat attack off the coast of Antarctica. Incredibly interesting, tell us a little bit about the book, don't give it all away, because I'd love for our listeners to buy a tale. And like you said, it's a collection of stories and lore that are from a lost civilization that is not very well known that was called Kwatra. So there's a lot of lore in this book, actually. And I've taken to calling it lore core, because it's like, it's a book for people that really like to deep dive into world building or into kind of like complex stories that aren't necessarily just one story. Like, if you know, the book, the Arabian Nights, it's kind of like a frame story, where as you go, you start to learn the story of each character and of each place, and so on.

Matt Zahab: 5:53

It's got like that metaverse feel to it.

Tim Boucher: 5:55

Yeah, exactly. And so that's kind of the big theme that I'm exploring in all of this. What I'm referring to as hyper reality, there's a really interesting Wikipedia page that I just discovered about this topic. And I was excited because it's like this describes exactly what I'm doing. And in the short version of that is, hyper reality is sort of the state that you get into when it becomes hard to tell where the facts and the fiction start and stop. And I think this is something that we've seen in kind of like a negative way, in the world of fake news, you know, where it's politically driven, or it's trying to get people to take some kind of action, whether for good or for bad. But I've tried to kind of like take those ideas in and just as a pure storytelling technique, and apply them in hopefully a more positive context to exploring this kind of alternate reality parallel reality world where, as you said, one of the means that this story has come to light is via some letters that were that were discovered in an attic. And these are the letters of Edward Allen Oxford, who, as you said, was a merchant marine in World War One who supposedly, according to the story, his ship was torpedoed after off the coast of Antarctica. Everyone aboard was lost, except for him. And he was found a couple of years later, and he claimed that he had survived on this tropical island, he wanted to a long convalescence, because people doubted his sanity. And during that time period, he wrote these letters, which were stored in this attic that eventually came to my hands. And from which I'm recompiling, the legends of this land and these people. So that's the book in a nutshell. There's the book itself, but then there's kind of all of the, the meta context and the culture around it. That is sort of driven it to

Matt Zahab: 8:05

The pieces of the puzzle. I love that. And that's

Tim Boucher: 8:08

Yeah, it's very much to be considered as a puzzle.

Matt Zahab: 8:11

No, it's incredible. I've started diving in and I'm very excited to finish off. Again, the whole publishing as an NFT and going the NFT route. Now, yeah, explain it to me as if I am a new writer that has just finished writing my couple 100,000 words, I'm about to fire off a book publish a book. And I'm weighing the pros and cons of going the traditional, you know, physical act of publishing a book versus going in more technological route and using the NFT boom, and piggybacking off of the NFT boom, what are the pros and cons of each way? And what would your biggest tidbits of advice be to someone just starting out in the space?

Tim Boucher: 8:53

Well, I think there's two things. That one, it doesn't necessarily need to be an either or proposition. And this feeds into number two, which is, it's good when there are new technologies to start learning and experimenting early. And because if you do that, as a creator, as someone who's really invested in the outcomes at the technologies, you can, you can really help to shape the directions that they will take just by the act of participating and sharing what you've got. So that's kind of the spirit that I'm taking it in. As you said, I published it originally last year, at the beginning of last year as a print volume. And I wouldn't say that's quite a traditional publishing path because I still did it as like, print on demand, publishing through a company called lulu.com for the print books, and I did ebooks through another company called publish drive, that it's kind of like a distribution aggregator that you can manage all of this stuff in one place. So even that is already, not necessarily the conventional path for writers, I think that the conventional path is probably more like, you know, you get a literary agent, you get a book deal, you do all this stuff. And I think that's fine and that's great if you can get that to work. I think there's like a vanishingly small fraction of writers who can succeed anymore in that kind of conventional path. And maybe even before it was already a low amount. But I think just because like, all the self publishing tools are there, all of the blogs, the social media, everything, there's so many books, so much information, that it's hard to break through the noise by taking a more conventional publishing path, which is why I chose the print on demand the self publishing path in the first place. Also, because if you're looking for an agent, or looking for a book deal, from what I understand, it seems like it's very advantageous to have a large built in social media following already. And if you have that great, but if you don't have that, you know, you're kind of in a catch 22 of how do you get the deal without already having the audience? You know, so that's, again, that's why I went the self publishing route. It was an interesting process. And I wouldn't say that it's easy, I would say that the easy part is writing the book. The hard part is then, you know, you've built this world, or you've built this thing, and how do you share it with people? And how do you get other people to be invested, that becomes the really hard part. And for me, I released the book kind of just before COVID really changed everything. People stopped going into their offices, but I had sent out, you know, dozens of review copies of the book, all over different countries. And yeah, I wasn't getting any responses because people stopped going to their office. So true to the name of my publishing company, my books were became lost books. And it's not the only story that I have like that about books of my getting lost. But as a result of that, I kind of like really experiment a lot with like I said, all this like meta contextual storytelling, all of the stuff that kind of goes around the book to build up the excitement and to build an audience. And at the end of last year, I started to experiment with NFTs I started on Rarible. In the first drawing, actually I ever sold was it was like a drawing for at the time, you know, $14 in Ethereum,

Matt Zahab: 12:33

Which is now worth 100.

Tim Boucher: 12:35

Yeah, which is now worth probably 10 times what it was originally it did. And that's like, it's just September, and that original art that I sold was from the Equestria metaverse and ties into all of this. But at the time, I was like, well, you know, $14, that's interesting. But that's not anything that I can stop my regular job. So I like I did a few more, I sold a couple of other things for really low prices. And then I kind of waited until maybe February of this year. And suddenly it it really started to take off in the middle of February, I got really involved in kind of the crypto art NFT space on Twitter, I think Twitter is like really the number one place to be involved in NFTs either as a creator as a buyer or just as a fan. Someone who's interested,

Matt Zahab: 13:22

Anything crypto related, that is the place to be. Tim before you keep going, one quick question, you brought up a great point in regards to releasing a product. And in this case for you or for authors, it would be a new book. Yeah, what is the way to go? Do you recommend building a community before launching that book or launch the book, then build the community? Obviously, finding the community first is easier. But are there ways around that?

Tim Boucher: 13:45

I think I mean, I think you just have to do it however you can do it because you don't, you can't always wait for the like the ideal perfect circumstances right to rise. And that includes either the audience, the distribution channels, the technology, whatever, like you just have to start wherever is easiest for you to start and keep going. I think in terms of the way that the creative process works, it kind of can be easier to start developing an audience just by sharing your creative process, you know, like you don't need to necessarily start with the perfect finished product. You can start with like all of the bits and pieces show people you know, talk about it and just share your excitement and I think people always respect that and they always kind of respond in kind when you do that. So I think that's a great way to go but if you find another path that works for you, I think, you know, try that

Matt Zahab: 14:37

Tomato tomato to each their own. On the NFT route. So you spoke about Rarible, which is one of the biggest marketplaces and exchanges in the world, one of the most famous ones one of the biggest ones. Step one, as an author would probably be setting up that hot wallet to make sure you have some $ETH or some binance coin or whatever. Yeah, maybe polka dot whatever the case may be but you definitely need something that allows you to onboard that as an NFT. You have to pay the minting fee so on and so forth. Can you walk our listeners through the full on process from choosing that hot wallet all the way to actually selling that first NFT?

Tim Boucher: 15:16

Absolutely. One thing I want to point out before I launch into that, though, is that there are kind of two big platforms, there's Rarible and there's open sea. And both of those right now really are, are centered on Ethereum. So I know there are plans to use some other blockchains like Maitake, Polygon and Tezos and Flow on Open Sea. But for now, the vast majority of all of the NFT minting platforms run on Ethereum. There's one on tezos, that's open called hic at nunc. And there is, you can use medic on cargo. But anyway, so I just wanted to put that out there because each one is a little bit different and open sea they have a different setup process, than Rarible and it's, you pay once to initialize your account, and then after that you mint for free and actually technically you're only minting when an item is sold or transferred. So it's like a reduced usage of energy and all of that, etc. But I'll walk you through like kind of the step by step process for Rarible because that's where I did my book lost direction. And I think it's a little bit more common right now their fee structure that Rarible uses, even though I do most of my other stuff on open sea because it's cheaper for me. But Rarible is good, because it allows multiple editions of something. So when you have an NFT, you can either sell an individual unit, like if it's a unique digital art piece, for example, this is often the way people go, they'll sell just one copy of it. There's one owner, that's it. And you can also sell an edition where basically you define the number of units. So in my case, I set up 100 for the book, but I'll come back to that in a second. So the first thing that I would do, as a new user who wants to sell a book on Rarible, would be to set up probably a Coinbase account. I think they're one of the easier ones to get on boarded if you're completely brand new to crypto and you don't understand anything, I think it's probably the best place to start. Maybe other people have other opinions on that, but that's what I found. So on Coinbase, what you're going to do is you're gonna have to complete the KYC that know your customer stuff, where you're gonna have to fill out your basic information, you're gonna have to link a bank account, and then you are going to use that bank account to buy a certain quantity of Ethereum. Now, the value of Ethereum goes up and down based on the market, and also the price of transactions, using Ethereum goes up and down based on a kind of almost separate market using another valuation called GUI. And that's really confusing as a new user, this is one of my biggest pet peeves with crypto is that everything is so complicated to set up and explain just to get started, it gets frustrating. Once you've got a Coinbase set up, I would probably try to deposit maybe between $100 and $200 us into that account. And then you rather use that to purchase Ethereum for an equivalent amount. And then you're going to have that Ethereum it lives in your Coinbase wallet. And then you're going to need basically a way to send that Ethereum to Rarible and the way that I do that is through a web three wallet. Web three is like the new kind of term for distributed blockchain applications and stuff. So you'll set up a web three wallet, there's a bunch of different ones but I use metamask and that's again, one of the more popular ones and that's part of why I use it because it's kind of easier to find support if you run into an issue from other people because there's just a lot of users. It's really well accepted at different websites that use web three wallets.

Matt Zahab: 19:11

Tim one second folks just jumping in here. Meta mask and again, no free ads but everyone you know at cryptonews everyone in the world loves meta masks but again, no free ads, meta mask you guys are awesome. Meta mask is a chrome a Google Chrome web browser add on that you put you know it goes beside some of you may have the you know one password up there. Some of you may have honey or lolli or notion or whatever the case may be it is an orange box that lives on your Chrome browser. And it connects to any application any website or platform that allows you to connect any ERC 20 tokens, which is the Ethereum blockchain. So again, it's the orange Fox and you'll see it on anyone's browser during any type of screen sharing or to you

Tim Boucher: 19:58

You see this on YouTube all the time. For sure. I also use it in Firefox. And it works works great in Firefox. And it's confusing because the logo of Firefox is also orange Fox. So it's like it's a little bit. Yeah, it's a little bit confusing. But right, so you have Coinbase is where you've stored your initial amount of Ethereum. For this example, metamask is going to be basically the wallet that lives on your browser and every time you go to a kind of a crypto compatible website, it's going to interact with your metamask wallet. And every time there's an interaction, you can kind of say, like yes or no, and if they will show you like if there's a fee, or whatever. So you're going to take your Ethereum from Coinbase and you're going to send it into your metamask wallet. And the best way to learn how to do that is just watch a couple of YouTube videos, it's not super complicated, but it's good to be careful and to go slowly and make sure that you're doing the right thing, because there's a weird kind of design issue with crypto, that if you send money to an invalid, or just the wrong type of wallet address, you could lose it. So be careful, go slow, ask people for help check out YouTube videos. And then once you've got your money in your metamask wallet, now you're able to go to websites like Rarible or to open sea, you can ow interact with their lockchains. And when you nteract with blockchains, in he form of writing new records r changing a record, you have o pay to interact with that ecause of the distributed ature of the system. There's a unch of different computers hat are like running alculations together, they make n agreement about what has appened, you know, like has eality changed for all of the odes like so they kind of come o an agreement and in order to uel that agreement process this s where you pay the gas fee or he transaction fee on Ethereum. o when you go to Rarible, you w ll be prompted to link your y ur metamask wallet and then I th nk you can set up a profile so t of like shortly after that. It s been a few months since I se up Rarible but it's a pretty st ndard, just set up a profile th ng. When you're ready, and yo have something that you want to publish, you go through the pr cess called minting. And like I aid, on Rarible normally you re paying when you mint an NFT. Minting just means that you' e creating a record on the bloc chain and all of these comp ters are agreeing to that reco d. So we have to we have to paus here for a second because eboo publishing is still not very well supported within the worl of NFTs. NFTs are, they've grow so much in a really short peri d of time, just a few mont s, that I think platforms are truggling to keep up with all f the different and not alwa s necessarily compatible user demands and priorities that peop e want to use their system for. So right now there is kind of a lack of platforms, which supp rt just conventional ebook form ts. Like for me, the conv ntional ebook formats would be E pub. mobi, which is the Kind e format, and then PDF. So I th nk the tezos platform hit get nown they support PDFs. And I've also been told that another plat orm called mintable supp rts PDFs, but I kind of chos a workaround in this is goin to make it sound comp icated. But for me, it was ulti ately easier to run because I wa already running, I was alre dy selling some ebooks on a webs te called gumroad.com. Wher gumroad is like a conv ntional digital file mark tplace. So I have my ebooks up t ere, I put my e pub, my mobi my PDF, I have just like a norm l product sale page on gumr ad. And it's a really great webs te. It's cool because you can ake a URL of a product and you an drop it into medium post, and it populates as a shop ing cart right in there, just for regular credit card stuf. But so what I did was I use y gumroad product page kind of a like the file host for all of t e E book files. And then I crea ed an NFT on Rarible that refer nces the gumroad. And the way t at it does that is when you y u make NFTs usually you're able o make unlockable content. So th s is content that only the buyer of the NFT can have access to, t e regular people who have not p rchased it are not going to be able to see that content. So wh t happens when you buy the NFT u ing the method that I did on Ra ible is that after you buy it you're able to see the unlock ble content. The unlock ble content for me is a coupon code for my gumroad storef ont. So basically, I'm still anaging all of my ebook files n one place, I'm just sendin you once you've made the purcha e of the NFT, over to the gumroa thing with 100% off coupon to download it. And so also,'ve done on top of that, for th first 100 people who buy the or ginal set, I'm offering a free p int version that will that I can ship almost anywhere in the world based on where my printe can ship. And that's just l ke an add on thing that I'm do ng to generate interest and ex itement. You don't necess rily have to do that and right n w, there's not a simple pathway that I found where I could g t the shipping address for an FT buyer, right, off Rarible that's not really an option r ght now. That might be somethin that people could build ki d of as an add on down the road or maybe as like a more customiz d ebook NFT marketpl ce, that kind of thing might ma e sense, but right now. And this is why I said like, you kind of ou can't wait for the perfect onditions. And it's good and beneficial to start early wit technologies. Yeah, and just o try to like to make an experi ent to do your best with what s available with the tools tha are available, see how it wo ks, and then don't just stop and then try to iterate o it, you know. Like, say, like is there a part of this, thi workflow that I can improve f r myself? So I don't have to a ways be getting people's ddresses by email? Or, you know, is there an improveme t that I can make on the produ t side, where either it's, you know, the shopping cart, or t's the actual ebook product i self, you know, like, always tr to take your feedback, anything, go and iterate o it. This is something I've real y taken from, like the Agile dev lopment philosophy where, yo know, you're always kind of t ying to continuously improve a you go. And it's something that I think, like you said, it' a way to build audiences too because as you get feedback from people about what's w rking, or what's not working, or what they like, or what could be improved, you know, like, y u kind of are strengthening your ties with the community of eople that support you and your ork. So, it's a really compatibl way to put out creative stuff I think.

Matt Zahab: 27:06

That's, I really appreciate you going into that

Tim Boucher: 27:07

I did publish onto medium.com an article. I think and teaching us about the process. I know, folks, you're probably thinking, wow, what a nightmare. But it's you know, it's one of those things wher it's like anything else in life you got to get your reps in. hen you first get into the cryp o space, it's very daun ing, it's scary, the barr er to entry are the walls, the alls are tall, and it's daun ing, but once you hit a couple t mes you're in the dance if you just go to medium or if maybe if you go to Google, you type like NFT book publishing how to something like that, you'll find my article under Tim Boucher, it's just my medium pro ile, and it has the steps and it has like links, so of all the e different websites and stu f to check out. But I agree tha it's really daunting to get sta ted in it sounds scary and it i a little scary. Because like I said, like, if you send money to the wrong address, your oney goes away, you know. So l ke, you just have to, like you h ve to learn and you have to ac ept that like, okay, maybe yo might mess up a couple of time, you might overpay a tran action fee by trying to make something when gas is high, b t it's part of the learning p ocess. And it's kind of an inv stment in your ability to, yo know, work with technology tha's beneficial and in a way, both for you and for other people. o it's like, it takes time and it takes energy to, to do it. ut I think it's worth it becau e it's brand new and it's wide pen. You know, I've only foun, I want to say after weeks of searching, I've only found may e five other people or mayb even less who have who have ut out NFTs as a book at all. S that's why you know, like thi is a completely open space and I haven't seen any big conven ional publishers doing it yet. ou know, there are plenty of ther kind of major brands t at are experimenting ith NFTs, but I haven't seen a y of those in the conventional publishing space, which tells e that okay, maybe my system can be improved for that I'm orking with today. But it tel s me that there's a big potentia advantage for me, as s meone who's early in this sp ce, like I said, to shape the c nversation and can s ape the future of the technolo y and maybe even work with y u know other people or work w th other companies as they get nderstanding and awar ness of the possibilities. You know that that's exciting for me too.

Matt Zahab: 29:35

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Tim Boucher: 30:38

No I'm not because like most of my gambling I do on the creative projects, you know, like

Matt Zahab: 30:43

I love it.

Tim Boucher: 30:44

Okay, I'm gonna put$60 into making this NFT or whatever, you know, like, and that's kind of where I put my sort of, like, extra time and if I have like small amounts of money to experiment with, I'll usually put it on a creative project. And a lot of times, you know, those end up bringing money back, you know, like, the way that I got into doing books as NFTs in the first place was because I was doing the crypto art stuff. And in February and early March, I really saw like, this was paying off, you know, like I was probably one of the small fish, you know, who was selling stuff at that time and being relatively successful, because there were people who they were selling, you know, unique digital artworks of all different kinds for, you know, upwards of 10,000 100,000 and in some cases, millions as, you know, the top tier people like beeple, just people who are doing really great in this. You know, for me, I'm still making money. I sold another another pixel art piece this morning, you know, I did a pixel portrait of Steve Jobs, I've done a bunch of like, pixel people portraits. And it's funny because like, unless you make those experiments, and you make those little gambles you don't know, which ones are going to pay off. And sometimes it's really surprising, which ones are the ones that end up being popular. So that's another reason why I like to try to like, be sort of nimble or agile and iterative and really, like, always kind of like come back and check in with yourself or with other people and say, like, Is this working? Is there stuff that I can do better? Are there things that are happening, you know, in a parallel field that I can kind of be inspired by. That was sort of what the genesis of the books as NFTs was, was just like, okay, I'm seeing this, this can work amazing results in digital artwork, why can't it do it for books? And it's funny, when you start, like any new thing like that, there's always, you're always going to find people say, like, oh, it can't work, it's impossible, it can't work, can't work can't work, you know, like, and if you always listen to that, you know, you're never going to do anything. But I think the history of crypto and the future of crypto, it's always going to be trying things that other people have said, oh, that's never gonna work, that's never going to work. And then, you know, boom, some people are successful, just because they tried and they kept at it, you know, so I think that's really the approach that you have to ake as an artist or a cre tor, because you got to keep try ng. It's hard to win but if you keep doing it, you're eve tually going to, you know.

Matt Zahab: 33:19

100%. On the writin side, as someone who also enjoy to write, I'm definitely not good writer, but I do love it Me personally, and this isn' the only thing this is the mass s, it's very difficult to actu lly put pen to paper or in our ase, you know, fingers to keyb ard, if you will, and real y get that output, you know bang and getting that ball roll ng. Give any tips for one of y u writers and how to actu lly ramp up that creative outp t.

Tim Boucher: 33:44

Um, for me, you know, it's, like I said, it's a really personal process. And for me, I've always just been someone who's really productive. But the way that I stay productive is by staying productive, you know. Like, I have downtime, and I try to use it, and I try to use it to make a new thing and to experiment with something and to put it out there and test. And I found that, like, the more momentum you build, the easier it is to maintain that momentum. And as your momentum is good and strong, yeah, like your muscles are getting stronger, you're exercising your faculties of creating or polishing or improving something. So for me, the thing is just like always be creating, you know, just always be doing something. You know, if it's for 30 minutes a day, if it's for you know, whatever you can spare, sometimes whatever you can''t spare, you know, and just being dedicated and being committed to it and I think like, even if you don't succeed on the crypto side, I think there's like there's so much success and satisfaction just by the sheer act of trying into lik to be always creating stu f, that those rewards are goo, too. You know there may be bet er in a lot of cases so.

Matt Zahab: 35:03

It's like the creative version of the sales always be closing. It's still ABC.

Tim Boucher: 35:08

Yeah, totally

Matt Zahab: 35:10

Still ABC. Tim, this has been awesome. Couple rapid fire questions before we wrap up here and I know you have a baby that you have to attend to who's currently on the oh precious nap time which, that's hilarious, yeah, that's me probably I don't know 5 10 maybe 15 years down the road, that's a story for another day. But yeah, so rapid fire questions here, when and if will Bitcoin hit 100k?

Tim Boucher: 35:34

I'm not sure I thought it was gonna be this year, but now it's just kind of hovering. So I want to say maybe next year or the year after, but I don't know. I feel like it's very likely or maybe more likely to me at this point with the way that things are looking that Ethereum will cross Bitcoin in value but it's really hard to predict these things because it's just such a volatile market and the industry and the changing technologies you know every day. But that's more my prediction is that Ethereum is going to cross Bitcoin and then maybe later we're going to be like you know, what's Bitcoin?

Matt Zahab: 36:18

The flipping is going to scare a lot of Bitcoin Nazis I don't know if the flipping is gonna happen

Tim Boucher: 36:23

I don't know either

Matt Zahab: 36:24

Just because of the whole the whole finite value but next question for you I have is who is your favorite author? It's probably a tough question.

Tim Boucher: 36:33

It's really hard. mean, it changes so much too ba

Matt Zahab: 36:34

Amazing and last question as you are from Quebec ed on your age and what you ne d and your sort of creative li e, you know, like or your fa tasy your imaginary life. Of co are you Montreal Canadiens fan rse, like Tolkien has always be n a huge influence on me and whe I was writing this book, I was going back through all of the like, the fantasy authors and books of my youth that I rea

Tim Boucher: 36:58

You know, again, with I think sports and gambling ly loved. And you know, like CS ewis and the Wind in the Wil ows and all those kind of lik the classic classic books in he Wizard of Earth See, I thi k probably I would have to say like, Ursula K Le Guin is pro ably my favorite all time wri er. If I had to pick one I jus think like her writing is so yrical all the time. And she s always bringing the goods you know, like you're always get ing there as the reader she neve leaves you hanging so I think robably her. for me are just two things I never got into because like I'm just always doing my own stuff. So like when I have downtime I'm kind of employing it in other fashions usually. And I've just never got the bug you know, fo following sports. I don't kn

Matt Zahab: 37:57

Oh sure that's one of the age old wants is all the w maybe it's a generati nal family thing because obody in my family is really i to it so I kind of didn't re lly grow up with it either yo know? athletes want to be artists and all the artists want to be athletes. Not in your case, but I know it's like you hear rappers talking about how they want to be athletes and you hear athletes talking about how they want to be rappers it's just

Tim Boucher: 38:22

Movie stars or something

Matt Zahab: 38:23

Exactly. It's you know, we can't have that, just incredibly interesting but Tim this was a blast really appreciate you coming on. I'm sure our listeners definitely learned a lot as well. Before we let you go, can you please tell our fans and listeners where they can find you on social online so on and so forth?

Tim Boucher: 38:40

Sure, if you just go to lostbooks.ca you'll find everything you'll find sort of the intro background story to the books, you'll find a bunch of links for Twitter you'll find the link to the Rarible NFT as well as gumroad, the ebooks, and also lulu.com, the print books. But just go to lostbooks.ca and you'll find it all right there. There's a contact forum. There's even I think it's something like the first 40 pages of the book, if you want to take a peek inside too.

Matt Zahab: 39:15

Any Twitter any socials?

Tim Boucher: 39:17

Oh yeah, on Twitter, it's tphlat and it's spelled TPHLAT and that's also linked from lostbooks.ca

Matt Zahab: 39:26

Folks you heard it there, that was Tim Boucher, lostbooks.ca got a nice little rhyme to it as well. And he is pioneering the NFT publishing space and is helping a lot of people along the way. Tim had a blast speaking to today. We'll definitely have you on

Tim Boucher: 39:42

Thanks. Me too.

Matt Zahab: 39:42

In you know, another six, nine to 12 months and I'm sure you will be an absolute vet in the space by then but thanks for coming on. Had a blast speaking with you.

Tim Boucher: 39:51

Yeah. Thanks, you too.

Matt Zahab: 39:52

Folks, this was the cryptonews.com podcast. Hope you enjoyed this episode with Tim Boucher. It would mean the world if you could subscribe, we have a bunch of incredible guests coming out. And as you already know, we air on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. It will most likely be that way for the foreseeable future. Thanks again for tuning in. And a quick shout out to our team, everyone on the cryptonews team and especially Justace, our sound guy who crushes it every single time. Love you all, and hope you have an amazing rest of the day. All the best. Bye

Tim Boucher: 40:20

Bye