okay GM can you hear me Zeneca are you with us
I can can you hear me dude. Let's go. I've been super excited to just chat with you for this however long
I'm gonna really look forward to it as well
Nice, I'm excited. Awesome, man, but we'll have some people trickle in and stuff
But yeah, I'm excited. We'll cover a whole bunch of different things. I just dropped you a little DM for some some context
But yeah for context for everyone else
I host this series periodically called misfits just to try and chat with people that I have a lot of time and respect for in
The hope is to give the microphone basically to people who I think are good actors who do interesting stuff and spend some time
Just having more personal conversations around a whole bunch of things that they're obviously related to crypto
But yeah, I wanted to just add a little bit of
Good media to the mix in a space that can be full of a lot of spam and stuff
So yeah, just a quick invitation for everybody. I've pinned. Sorry. Excuse me. I've pinned a little tweet
Sharing this space if there's anyone that you can think of who would want to listen in
Where you just want to share that yourselves, that would be awesome and helpful
And yeah, we'll get into it in a second here
I don't want to do too much of the like old-school. What's your background? I'm sure you've done this a million times
Zeneca, but I'll give you one sort of triplet
So that you know in case there is anyone in here who hasn't heard of you which feels unlikely they can kind of track
So what do you do in crypto? Like how do you describe that? What are you sort of spending your time on day-to-day and
What keeps you here? So instead of the origin story basically like why are you still here?
Good question. What do I do in crypto is such a tough question to answer like my default when someone asked me
What do you do for a living or after fill out a form? I just put down like crypto trader and
I think that largely summarizes where I'm at right now. I think I spend probably
more time than anything else on
Frating or like finding opportunities in this space basically to make money one way or another and
secondary to that is content creation and running Zen Academy and the three-three-three Club my communities and
all that kind of stuff, but it's really just that's
that's what I do now and that's what keeps me here because I find it really fun and interesting and exciting and
I love it like it. There's
Chaos and it is very high-paced and stressful at times and chaotic and all that kind of stuff
But I wouldn't trade it for anything at the moment, you know
maybe a few months from now six months from now I get burned out tired and
You know, I decide I want to do something else like focus more on the content creation side
But right now that's that's kind of what is what's keeping me here
Amazing man. Well, let's stick with the trading then for a little bit
I'm curious like do you remember the first time you had a coin that just went up very seriously
I feel like it's written into our nervous systems
Like everyone has their original. Oh my god, that was the coin that went up a lot
I'm curious if you have like a first story to share
This truly come to mind one is Eve in 2017. I bought it. The first time I bought Eve was like
like a hundred and fifty dollars or something like that and
You know, it just kept going up and up and up to like a thousand fifteen hundred in that cycle
So that was great to see but the one that immediately came to mind is ripple
I think I kind of what I bought it out
It was like maybe 20 cents or something and it just ripped to like three dollars in no time
And I was like, you know, I was a professional poker player before this
So I was just like, you know sitting at the poker table. Everyone was talking about crypto all the time
I was like, what the hell is happening? This is madness. That was the first time that I was just
Just blown away by it. I obviously round-tripped almost all of it because you know
When just the human brain is crazy, it gets to three dollars. You're like, what if it goes up another 10x?
But I sold a little bit at the top or near the top. So but yeah, that's the first one that came to mind
Yeah, I feel like there's just a euphoria that is hard to communicate to people who are outside of crypto when you watch
What is basically a penny stock right go to dollars where there's so many people who are like, well
What if my XRP goes to the price of Bitcoin? I'm gonna be an oligarch, right?
And so I I feel you feel like we all have some stories like that on on the poker front though
This is actually something I've been hoping to ask you for a while
You have talked about this widely in interviews like anyone who's followed you would know this about you
But when you think about crypto trading like what are the transferable skills you've taken from poker to this kind of chaos?
And then a sort of sub question to that is what are some things you had to learn just through the sort of pain and suffering
Of losing money or round tripping?
There's so much that the same it's like
There's a reason there's so many poker players that have made the transition to whether it's you know
Tradify or crypto trading because it is the parallels are just the never-ending
for everything from like bankroll management and how to like deal with
Just your bankroll and and like bet size and trade size and all that kind of stuff
it's just directly comparable to thinking in terms of like probabilities and odds and
Probabilistic thinking basically where it's like well, I can buy this token
And if I think 95 percent of the time it's going to zero
But five percent of the time it's going to do a hundred X that I'm gonna buy that every single time
and I think that perhaps for some people it isn't as
Natural to think of I'm gonna buy this and 19 times out of 20. It's gonna go to zero
Oh, I'm still gonna buy it but like poker trains you to think in odds and statistics and that's another big one
the third and probably that the most significant is sort of the
the psychological element of it all and in terms of like handling up swings and down swings and like making tons of money losing tons of
Money and not letting it completely destroy you emotionally is is something that you know, I learned I
Think poker really prepared me for obviously there's still good days and bad days and you know, no matter what the most
seasoned poker player gambler professional the world will still have instances where
You know their emotions get to them, but it really helped. I think
Prepare me for this and then you know
Continuing the psychological side of things
It's sort of thinking as money thinking of money more as a tool rather than as money and sort of like separating your emotions a bit
more from it like if you're at a poker table and you're facing a decision and you're like
You know this call all in could be a holiday or car or rent for a week or a month or a nice dinner
You just never gonna make a good decision. So you learn pretty quickly to think alright
These are the chips on the table. These are points and only once you've left the table
Do you sort of count really how well you did or how poor you did and then how that affects your overall
Bankroll and strategy and maybe you reassess but you as much as possible try and stay in the zone
and I think it's that's very helpful with crypto trading as well because
Again, if you you know, oh my ripple went to $3 if I sold it all I could have put a deposit on a house
But you know, I didn't and now that's gone. It's like that will eat you up inside if you think like that
Totally wow, there's so much there
I feel like the the first thing that always sticks out when I talk to poker people as someone who didn't play poker like
Only plays for fun kind of thing is the probabilistic thinking piece
Most people don't really think about breaking their money into different categories or thinking like ah, you know, this is not a binary solution
It's not just like this goes up. It's a maybe a lot of the time, right?
And so thinking in that way of super super key points highlight and then also yeah
I love that kind of mental separation from money because if you're playing with anything of size
It becomes very weird very quickly, right? We're like, well, this is a lot of like a car or something worth of a trade
But if you think that way it just kind of destroys your ability to operate
One thing for you that I just pinned from another poker friend
That I've been thinking about a little bit is recently is table selection
I'd never heard of that term
But I'm sure you're you're familiar with it this idea that I think for both of us actually like in 2021
If you shift it over to NFTs early in the cycle
That was like the table to play right because there wasn't a lot of experts around
most people were focused on trading the coin and Eve or maybe DeFi stuff and
People cleaned up right and so I don't know. I've just loved pulling on that thread of poker
This sound this sounds like a great article. I hadn't come across it, but I'm definitely gonna read it after this because
Table selection is so important and there's two common sayings in
Well one common saying and one thing that I say a lot in poker one is
If you can't spot the fish at the table
You are the fish and the other one I say when people say oh you good at poker or were you good at poker or anything
Like that and I say that's irrelevant. You don't have to be good at poker to win at poker
You just have to be better than the people you're playing against and you could be the 10th worst player in the world
But if you're playing against the nine other worst players, you're gonna make money
And you could be the the 10th best player in the world if you're playing against
The other nine best players you're probably gonna lose money over the long run. So
Yeah, applying that sort of thinking to crypto as well
You know if you're trying to
I don't know leverage trade
the major coins against you know, giant whales and people with the
So much experience and you didn't have that experience. You're probably gonna have a bad time. But if you go to some I
20th tier blockchain that's just popped up and no one's really poking around there and
you you start looking into NFTs and maybe get that's where you can find an edge and then you sort of you find out where
You have your skills and abilities and where they might be better than other people
And try and just stay one step ahead basically
one thing I guess I want to flag before I keep asking a couple more trading questions is if anyone has
Questions that they want to pose to Zeneca feel free to drop that in the comments of this space or hit me with a DM
And if it's appropriate, I'll kind of bring that in
But yeah, one thing that I'm maybe selfishly curious to ask is how do you think about?
What is hype like kind of flavor of the week flavor of the month versus what has more staying power like what's more durable?
There's a lot of stuff in crypto where it has like a week in the sunshine and then it's dead
And that's kind of a version of a trade where it's very quick in and out other stuff like say even board apes
There's a huge window of time where it's just up only right and if you sold early you would have missed out on most of
Upside and I think this is like the fickle thing that I struggle with most in
Crypto markets is like well, what do I actually believe in that's gonna last?
We see just like so much information flow and it's very hard to assign like value to what comes across my desk
So to speak so I'm curious how you think about that because when you try and make bets
I feel like that's a big part of the process
Yeah, I mean I think they're
The the default mindset is that everything is hype and speculation. There's this chart
I can't remember who first created it, but it was making the rounds on Twitter a few months ago
basically, it's like a bar chart and the first column is
mean coins and then it's a hundred percent speculation and then the next column is
Fundamental protocols or something and it's 99% speculation and 1% fundamentals and
That's kind of the reality of our space over the long term
It becomes more important the fundamentals of the project
Like if you you think about is this project gonna be around five years from now people are gonna be caring about it then
Play that much to me. It's it's more about trading
narrative and momentum and what other people think but there is certainly an extent that it comes into play and the example I
Think I wrote about in my discord earlier today or yesterday
Yeah, this is about the dimension airdrop and and I think some people make the mistake of sort of
Treating all airdrops the same and it you know
There's sort of recent history where there was the Jupiter airdrop
But then there was the when airdrop and there was some LFG airdrop on Solana and like those are kind of mean coins
And then they look at Jupiter and then they look at they mentioned like well two of those tanked and then one of the did
There's a good chance. It's gonna tank
I'm just gonna sell everything right now and I think you really have to look at the underlying protocol and compare like with like and
Maybe you look at last year or you look at outlier or something that has that actual
fundamental utility and value where other apps or
Companies or platforms that ever actually going to use it versus being a total mean and that will give it more longevity
Now, I mean you could definitely have made money
Trading Jupiter and sorry trading when or trading LFG or whatever other mean token
But those are the ones that you're talking about that well
you know, they're gonna die within a week and as long as you sort of can identify that it really is
It will serve you. Well, yeah
but it's not always easy to identify those because there's always there's occasionally some mean coin that just it just keeps going and it just
You never going to be able to get it right all the time, basically
Totally well said I'm gonna loop in this question from CT because I think it's partly it explains a little bit of what I'm thinking
The her question. I'll just read it for everybody. It's pinned at the top
I'm super curious about Zen's view on Farcaster longevity like 30 days three months six months will everyone be over there
You know does crypto Twitter exist alongside this how does this exist before you before you speak to that?
It's that kind of middle range that I find interesting to play with like there is stuff
Like you said like when lasted for however long
Jupiter may have a like a longer season
We're kind of playing with these weird middle time frames like long run
It's sure buy some Bitcoin and even Solana or whatever you believe in and hopefully these things will do well
And then day to day you have like 19 year old kids shit coining in the trenches on rent
Whatever random blockchain and making serious money
It's the middle range where all the normal people try and play right where it's like well, what about this month or this quarter?
So yeah, no, I find your I found your take that really helpful. It's just hard to get everything, right?
But yeah trying to figure out conviction around these timeframes is it's hard sometimes
Yeah, curious to just like pass this over to you on the Farcaster side if you have any takes
I know you just wrote a piece on it
Yeah, just before getting to Farcaster just on that whole middle range piece, I think
It can definitely be difficult to sort of play that range and know what to do and to me
what I've generally found helpful is basically just hedging your bets and
Doing things like if the price pumps you sort of take some you don't sell everything
If you have this if you have like medium to long-term conviction
Or like let's say you just have medium-term conviction if it pumps right now like the first three days after buying it
Some people like oh my god, it's pumped. I'm just gonna sell everything
But then you miss out on the potential upside if it does continue to run over the next three months
And this is the beauty of fungible tokens
You can sell 50% of your stack
you can sell 5% or 10% or 80% and I think that getting comfortable with the idea of it's not all or nothing and just sort of
basically you de-risk basically dollar-cost average in or you can also dollar-cost average out of your positions and that helps sort of
even out that whatever happens over the you know, it gives you some upside if the thing does do a
100 X or a thousand X, but it also protects you if it does crash and go completely completely to zero
And in terms of farcaster
The longevity to me, I think farcast is up only I think it it has reached escape velocity
And it will only it will pretty much only grow over time. I'm
Extraordinarily bullish on the future of farcaster and every day that bullishness grows
I'm already finding myself spending less time on Twitter and more time over there and absolutely loving it that said
Crypto Twitter will absolutely survive for a very long time and it will survive alongside it
There are some people that just prefer crypto Twitter. There are some people that
will not want to use farcaster, I do think that there is a
probably a point in the future where
Have fully migrated over there that is probably years away as well
And we're probably due to other things than just whatever this hype right now is going on
But it's it's inherently a much more crypto native platform and we've had these in the past
But you know, we've had big cloud and friend tech and others, you know decentralized social media platforms
But they've generally been more financially driven
Whereas this is just it's an excellent product and it's decentralized and it's built on top of aetherium
Optimism and it's just like it's it's just better and I think that you can do things with it. You can you can embed
web elements of web 3 all throughout the platform and I think the question is not necessarily will
Crypto Twitter will everyone be over there from crypto Twitter. I think eventually yes
After a long period of them both surviving, but will non crypto people start using the platform?
That's probably the biggest hurdle that they have to overcome
But I really think that they will because it is to me
It's just if you take Twitter and read it and put them together. It's just a better version of that and
It's probably soon gonna be
You know tick-tock and Instagram and you know better in those senses as well
but to me right now and probably for the foreseeable future, it's just a great perfect hybrid of Twitter and
Read it but just better in almost every single way
Except for perhaps the number of people if that's something you care about
But that's it's also better in many ways because the signal to noise ratio is so good right now
Yeah, well said I found myself talking about this last night at dinner actually with a bunch of people
The farcaster is like an actual proof of product that leverages crypto in some way
That does solve like a real problem that most normal people who just don't care about our internet coins actually understand
Right like open social graphs essentially. I've been trying to take on bigger social media companies. So I'm also very
Half an hour ago. I said this on another I was on a
Show thing and basically it came to me that it's kind of and obviously this is not the same extent
But to a very very small extent to me
it feels a little bit like the chat GBT moment for crypto because you know anyone can you just download an app on your
phone and create an account and set it up and then you
You get ether wallet has automatically been connected for you
Your seed phrase is there for you to unlock and get access to but if you don't want to do any of that
You're you're just interacting with this new social media platform and it's easy and it's good and it's fun and it's it just works well
That there's a little bit of that going on exactly like you were saying. It's this killer use case for for web 3
Totally well, this is a nice little soft shill
I guess for everyone in the audience if you haven't done anything on farcaster yet go spin it up and follow both of us
And go have some fun. It's definitely interesting over there
Well, I'd love to chat a little bit about the Zen Academy slice of what you're up to
Maybe for people who aren't familiar if you could give a quick like what's the origin story?
What's the community about and then we'll hit a few questions
Yes, I mean Zen Academy started in
You know, I got into the space
fully in like 2021 obsessed with NFTs and
started creating some content on Twitter and a newsletter and basically realized that I
I've been doing so much trading
I was kind of like wanting to take a bit of a break and I realized that I love the content creation and
educational content side of things
And was thinking well, what can I do and it just seemed like an interesting thing to do to start a token gated
Community at the time. This was kind of before there were too many other ones. The only one I really remember
that wasn't like a PFP project was
Basically, it was just like that
Let me just start a discord server and see where this goes and then you're token gated and the focus will be on education
And teaching people, you know how to get into NFTs. What is an NFT?
What is a wallet? How do you set up a wallet because I'd gone through the onboarding process and the learning curve was so steep
It's still is steep. But back then it was it was really difficult and that's where it all started from and then over the last sort
Two two and a half years now it has
Obviously evolved where a lot of the community is no longer
total beginners looking to figure out, you know, what is an NFT and how do I get started and it's sort of like I would say
veterans or more experienced crypto participants basically just
Trying to make it in the space one way or another and we have you know
We have a lot of founders in the community who have their own projects and you know every week we have a call with them
and try and help each other out on how to build in this space, but we have a lot of people that are doing things like
You know trying to flip NFTs and grind for all out
There's so many different ways you can make money in this space and basically I had this realization a few months ago that
we were trying to do all these different things in Zen Academy and the reality was that if I was being truly honest the vast majority
of people in Zen Academy and in the entire crypto space want to make money even if you're
You're doing so many other things. You're you're building something you're creating content you're writing code
There's a very very very very very small percentage of people that don't care about money everybody else
they at least only want to make money mostly want to make money or in addition to everything they're doing they still like to make
realizing that you can do that in a
non-degenerate way a non scammy way is
Which is the thing that people appreciate that and want that and so the community has sort of been
Let's say thriving over the last few months when when that switch happened and another big switch that happened around the same time was
Been existing for a couple years and you know NFT royalties went away
Basically, the writing was on the wall mid 2022 and then not that long after maybe a few months later
It basically royalties went to near zero and so we were thinking we basically said, alright
We need to figure out additional revenue to support as a business and how can we continue as a business?
You know, there are a lot of people that are a part of the team and employed and we had expenses and you know
We tried different media things newsletters podcasts. We tried to daily Twitter spaces we to get sponsors
we tried consulting we tried all these different things and
Unfortunately, it didn't really work out and then I basically had the realization towards the end part of it
I think was because a I didn't
Really want to run a company and be I didn't think I was particularly good at it
and the thing that I wanted to do and think that I was decent at was running a community and
There's always been this kind of kind of friction
But for NFT projects where there's the company versus the community and you know
What's good for the company is not necessarily good for the community and vice versa and I said, you know
Let's just drop the company side and you know, there is still legally a company
There needs to be for legal reasons, but I no longer think of it or run it as a company
I run it as a community and
to me that it's just been
It's just been this just a relief since that realization and change
No, I think part of why I was excited to have you on is you have run one of the more like durable
In this kind of lane of crypto that I'm aware of
And it's just hard to get people to care about stuff for a long period of time
You know, you're in a thousand discord servers again, like the hot thing every month or every quarter is different
People are hopping in and out of stuff all the time
So yeah, I mean a more power to you
But I guess to reframe that as a question
it's like how do you get people to care like how do you get people to stay around because I think a lot of people whether
They're you know in trading groups or they're trying to start their own startup or they're making art and trying to facilitate a community around that
That seems to be the stumbling block for most folks. It's like, oh, well, it just died or like it faded out whatever
would you would you just speak to that a little bit maybe on the kind of community design question of how do you think about
Getting people to care and to stick around and to build those like relationships of depth
Yeah, I think with I mean community building takes time there's you can't
Otherwise it will disappear as quickly as it came and you see this all the time in this space
There's some hot new thing someone spins up a community or there's a brand new project and everyone is hyped and excited because they're making
Money or that they're they're bonding over some
Whatever a meme or some art
But then it will just disappear within a day or two or a week or two or a month or two
to me when I think about community building I take
Crypto out of it. I take web3 out of it and just like if humans have been
Building and forming communities for as long as we've been humans. We're a social species, you know communities form around
Book clubs is just you know
That's what we do as humans and they're online video games clans guilds. It's just there's so many different ways communities form and
Why do why do they form and why do they stay and why do they grow it's because
People want a place to belong. They want to feel this sense of belonging. They want to find people that they
can regularly see and interact with and feel kind of like
they're at home or like that that kind of comfort vibe and
that to me is the kind of culture we've built and developed over the last two and a half years at Zen Academy where you know,
Be a good human first and then everything else second and and I'm just fortunate that so many
wonderful people have decided to
It calls an Academy home so that even if I don't if I'm not there
Vibes are going to be great because people
will respect each other and help each other out and someone comes in with a question and someone will be there to answer it and
It's simple, but it's not necessarily easy because it's just sort of it takes a lot of
Time to build up. But once you do it's um, it's almost self-sufficient. So that's kind of how I think about community building. I
Love that I'm reminded of that Jack Butcher image of essentially like exponential growth of just nothing nothing nothing nothing
Nothing and then eventually a nice little bar of growth
And so much of community stuff ends up feeling that way. I think
So that's that's super well said for anyone who has kind of just joined us
If you have questions for Zeneca, feel free to drop this in kind of the comments of this Twitter space
And we can loop some of those in
We've gone for 30 minutes so far
I definitely have a few more things I want to hit but also want to be mindful that you know
If other people want to add some things here, and we just got you know, another 30 minutes and we'll go kind of as far
Cool well, I'd love to just chat on some of your writing stuff before hitting maybe some some like quick fast-round questions
You write a great newsletter. I don't say that lightly. I read a lot in the space
It's covered kind of like a full stack of things, right?
It started as you were saying earlier around kind of more intro level stuff
But now I kind of think of it as like a generalist almost a column
Like a newspaper column for what's what's going on in the space?
How do you decide what to write on let's start with that
I mean first of all, thank you and it's very mutual. You also have a great newsletter and actually
Funny story after Marfa. I was thinking about writing a newsletter on Marfa and I had in my drafts a
Title the magic of Marfa and then I saw that you put that out and I said well
This is great and I don't feel that funny burning need or desire to write about anymore because you captured it so well
That was a really excellent piece
Wait, I forgot the question was it how do I think about what to write about?
Yeah, I'm just curious how you decide what to write on like there's so much that comes across like the crypto desk, right?
And you seem to have a pretty good selection for at least when I read your stuff. It's like, oh, yeah
Okay, I want to read about that like Farcaster is the most recent one and it's very timely. So yeah, it's
Don't and I don't say every Friday I'm putting out a newsletter
It's not a weekly regular thing and it goes against all conventional newsletter growth wisdom, and I've definitely tried that in the past
Things that I'm curious about I tend to write about
and things that I look are timely and
for instance, I I have been planning
For ages to write about eigenlayer, which I think is an incredible
Thing in protocol and it's it is timely because they're just on
Cap their staking pools a couple days ago
But I got so fascinated by farcaster that I sat down to write about I can lay I was like, you know
What I I don't really have this desire right now my all I can think about is farcaster
So let me write about this instead and I think that
Following my genuine curiosity and interest and excitement plus that feeling that I don't
Really ever feel forced to have to write at least most of the time that sometimes I did
Enforce something like that on myself or impose that but most of the time it's like
Just have words inside me that I just want to get out there and that that is when I write and I think that
I guess timely or on point or
Something that people want to read at the right time because I don't force it out
At least I don't do it anymore there were probably a couple that I said, hey, I want to write it
I should try and grow my newsletter and let me just alright what I want to write about and I would sit there for
Half an hour and think of something then I would write about it
But yeah, it isn't is sort of my experience that good writing never comes from
Feeling like you have to write good writing comes from when you can't not write
Yeah, that's the one-line quote for sure man, I definitely agree
I wrote that Marfa piece like from a couch in 45 minutes because it was just like I have so much
I want to say about this experience
That's a that's definitely a really strong way to do it and encouragement for everybody if you're interested in reading newsletters and stuff
And I think there's a Lincoln's and it cuz bio that will take you there
And there's a good backlog of stuff to read actually if you're kind of newer potentially to
Crypto land and maybe feeling behind there's a lot of really like accessible stuff to check out
I'm curious like did you write before crypto? It was just an interest that just kind of came up from your experiences here
Well, I read a little bit. So I've always loved reading and writing ever since high school
English was my favorite subject. I was gonna do law
Actually, I did do law for a while
Till I realized I hated it, but that's that's another story
And then when I was a poker player, I did have a poker blog, but it was like a really
It was in like when was it 2009 to 2013 or something?
And it was kind of before the era of newsletters as we know them now and so it's like a static website blog
And I didn't really know what I was doing. I never really tried to grow it. I was like sometimes I'd post about
Literally, I post about gardening once sometimes I post about food that I was cooking in restaurants and travel and sometimes was poker strategy
And it was all over the place, but it was writing and I did enjoy it and I did it for a while
It was never sort of it never really blew up, but it was a little bit of writing and then I kind of stopped up until
the the newsletter I started in 2021 and it was for me a
Large part of it was because I I know that if I have to write about something or if I am writing about something
I need to research it and understand it properly and well enough
Even if I'm interested in it, I will do so much more research
And so it's kind of my way of saying all right, I'm gonna I really I'm all in on NFTs and crypto
I really just want to understand this space and go really really deep
I'm just gonna put out a newsletter and write about and see where that goes and at the start
I would do like I think three or four a week, which is kind of crazy because now it's like one every two months
But it was you know, I wrote about
Board H when they minted I wrote about the gutter cat gang
I wrote about pickles and I might have been written about penguins. I need to go back and check actually
And super yetis and it was just like every random project that was coming up and what was on my radar
I was just talking and writing about it and
Then it sort of evolved into something else, but it really just started from
Hey, I want to learn more and let me just write about it and I go back and I do read
Occasionally, I'll go back and check in and like my writing style has changed so much from start to end
For instance for starters the earliest ones are like six paragraphs long and now they're like four billion words long
So that that has changed but it's also just like I don't know as you write more
It's it's like a skill and I think that it changes and evolves over time and hopefully gets better
Totally I love that so much
I feel like I asked that original question because everyone who's writing that I like seems to have a
Precursor story of like I had this blog that didn't blow up or like I used to do this thing in school
There's always some kind of affinity for the written word
And so I yeah, I feel that I see that there's definitely that that sense of like I even struggle to read stuff
I wrote more than three years ago because it's just so different
To the way that I write now that it feels almost like a different person or you want to go back and change it or something
So I definitely I resonates
On some of what you just said
I want to kind of pull on a thread there like you you said you write about what you're interested in and you've taken all
It's research and information flow. How do you keep track of the space like kind of a zoom out higher level question?
But what do you read? What do you listen to?
Like I just I feel like yeah, I'm always curious how people kind of come to the information that they they digest. I
Think I just drink through the fire hose so much like I'm just constantly
Fucking Twitter. I'm just constantly
Fucking discord like when I'm when I'm in the space
I'll go through periods where I'll take time off or like be half in half out, but like
lately over the last month and
most of the end of last year I
Was I made a conscious decision was like, you know what? I think the market is heating up
I want to really go all in and capitalize on things these few months or this year or just as much as I can
Because of all the opportunities that I think there will be and I will just I'll wake up. I'll jump on Twitter
I'll check people out notifications on I will just refresh the feed a bunch of times. I'll go in discord
I'll see what people are talking about what happened overnight
Now farcaster is a big part of it
I will just I just drink through the fire hose and just there's so much information and it's just it's
it's definitely overwhelming and it's a lot but I feel like I
am abreast of most things going on in the space and then it's kind of like
pattern recognition and kind of
A bit of a gut sense and feeling of like, alright
So these eight people that I really respect are all talking about eigenlayer
I should probably take a look at eigenlayer and okay. Yes, it's a really really big deal
So I'm gonna spend more time researching and then you know, it's kind of like if if one person talks about it
It's like one bit of data one data point and it probably goes in one ear and out the other but if if many people
Then you pay attention there are certain instances where like there are certain people that if one person says I'll be like, right
This person is incredibly tuned into the space or you know
They I just personally think that they have great alpha or insights and I'm just gonna look into it just because they said so
but for the most part, it's just about getting as many data points as possible and then
hopefully your brain can you know
Pattern recognizing that right that's kind of there's there's something happening there
Well, well this meta seems to be forming or look all the attention all the smart people are over here
Let me just pay attention there today and sometimes you'll get it, right?
Sometimes you'll get it wrong, but that's that's kind of how I deal with all the information at least
Totally there's definitely some people that I have on the high signal list if that makes sense where it's like
Okay, if one of these five people is making a call not so much as a copy trade thing
But just as they're like they tend to be early to things
So that that makes a lot of sense. There are some natural segue
Sorry, just to jump in there are some people that
If they make a call or whether it's a DME or in a group chat or occasionally on Twitter
I will just I will go it's like eight first think later
Do you just you just go and buy as quickly as you can and then you use some research and then you can decide
If you really hate it, you can you can sell and maybe you hopefully don't lose too much
but that the space moves so quickly that I think and and I think maybe my my
Poker and gambling background and that high-risk tolerance
Is favorable in this instance because it's just like that ability to just blindly just ape into something as
Quick as possible and then figure out very quickly afterwards
What are you gonna do because yeah, there are some people who just they only they rarely post and then if they do
It's like it almost always works out. Well, and you just can't miss those opportunities
I'm just like chuckling behind the muted mic because I do the same thing
But I've actually come to think about it as a trauma response where you're like
I've missed out on so much upside from these people's calls that now I just have like a hot wallet where you're like
All right, whatever this thing is like a thousand dollars is going into that and we'll see what happens after
Or you have to obviously do some DD, right? But
Makes sense. I totally see that
Yeah, I was just curious to ask you like what I mean since you're kind of plugged in now and back in
The industry full-on like what are you excited about? You've hit on for a caster and I can layer
Maybe maybe those are the core things but could be art could be themes could be projects
What yeah, what should people be mindful of or be exploring?
Those are definitely two of the biggest ones right now, I think
narrative of the I think the upcoming cycle that this recurring theme that is going in my head and I think that we're all
The multi chainness of it all where in 2021 it was especially for NFTs. It was basically just beef
there's a little bit of stuff on Solana and occasionally a little bit of stuff elsewhere now, there's
three to five significant blockchains their own NFT ecosystems and then ten others or twenty others that have like
The same goes for defy and for L2s and there's just so much stuff happening everywhere. It's so much more spread out now
That's just I don't know something that is this thought that keeps bouncing on my head in terms of what I am
farming and points and staking to airdrop kind of thing that we're going through because I really
Kind of I've joked about it on the timeline a few times where it's like, you know
It's all this crazy points matter and things like that
But I really do think that this cycle I'm growing more and more convinced this cycles Ponzi
There's always a Ponzi the cycles Ponzi to me. The biggest one is going to be of this whole stake
Your tokens to get airdrop for more tokens stake those tokens to get airdrop for more tokens. Like we're seeing it with
Celestia and do I am an outlier and like people already staking those for all the future ones and
I can layer is gonna be the same
Presuming they do a token which I think basically everyone expects that they will and that's I think there's a lot of good money
because it kind of it works for everyone until it doesn't and so
you know, I I've been bad in the past about taking profit and getting out at the right time and
Not round tripping. And so I'm trying to be
Hyper-cognizant about it this time, but the difficulty is I mean, this is the difficulty of the space if you're too
Too like gunshot then you you end up missing out on a ton of gains and so it's about how can you structure a strategy?
So that you ideally capture a good amount of the upside and protect yourself from the downside
And that's that's basically by having a strategy and sticking to it. The sticking to a part is the hardest part having the strategy
Not that difficult to come up with a strategy. The hardest part is actually sticking to it and
forcing yourself to take those profits when when you have them or or to keep
You know money in when something's gone like it's hard to hold a token that's gone up 10x
Because you have conviction and think you can go another 10x
But like if that is wrong and it crashes to zero
That's kind of a gut-wrenching feeling knowing that you had that much profit. So figure out a strategy that allows you to
Yeah, reap as much of that upside as possible without
Completely. Yeah risking everything
I think I've come to think about the kind of difference between the 2021 euphoria and now as like concentration versus dispersion
Same same kind of thing just different words where most stuff happened on the last time around
Now it's so scattered that you actually can't physically keep up with everything right even for us here 14 hours a day
Trying to figure out what to do with crypto coins on the internet
Like I feel woefully behind on most things and so it's kind of back to that table selection
Conversation near the beginning of this where I think yeah
You have to sort of figure out where your lane is
Are you gonna be a Solana person or you're gonna try and be like an eigenlayer person?
Whatever like there are different ways as you have said many times already. It's different ways to make money and different ways to play
But it's just like don't go too broad because otherwise you kind of miss out on everything
That's all right. That's how I'm trying to coach myself. Anyway
So I feel it. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think
It's like a double whammy because a the space has gotten so much
Just more spread out and that you just find
Necessity need to pick your lane and pick a couple of areas and just really focus on those
But the other part is that even though it wasn't as spread out last time
I still sort of spread myself way too thin and I had way too many tokens way too many NFTs from too many different collections
I couldn't keep up with it at all and I ended up just making bad decisions all around the place
so I think like my overall like my if there was one overarching arching strategy that I have for this entire cycle it is
bet with size on the things that you have conviction in and
You know, I sometimes I'm able to stick to that sometimes I get
Random FOMO and YOLO and APN to DJN coins like everyone else that's you know, the DJ in this space
but I'm every day or every week really trying to
rebalance my portfolio and make sure that the bulk of my
Capital is deployed into things that I have really high conviction in and I haven't found myself with you know
50 random tokens in 10 different wallets on eight different blockchains
Man I'm chuckling again because I also feel the same way
I have some I have a drafted tweet which is basically like make a few concentrated bets and chill
But I also think it's a trauma response like round two from having gone through
Markets before where you just have way too much going on. It's a decision fatigue at the end of the day, right?
There's just too much for your brain to keep track of and it's hard to weigh decisions against each other and things like that
So I'm definitely with you
It's funny to see real. Yeah
Totally it's just funny to see people kind of come to similar conclusions ultimately from enough
Sweat equity in the market if you will
Cool man, well, I have three kind of quicker questions for you and then we'll see what the the crowd is like
I mean just again to flag maybe a final time if you have questions for Zeneca
Feel free to drop those in the chat and I'll go through those at the end
These are these are just sort of random or the junk drawer type of questions with things that I felt like would be still
So first up if you have to work a job in the industry and so this is apart from Zen Academy
Is there a team you'd like to join and if not that specific? Is there an area that you would like to work in and and why?
Well, that's a great question
The first thing that comes to mind is art blocks because I mean, I love generative art
I love art blocks and I love every single person I've met from the team this that that that sounds like it would be really fun
Honestly, there's just nothing else coming to mind so that's that's an easy one
Honestly, that's a good answer. Yeah
Sorry, was there a second part to that question? Oh
Just to explain your reasoning, but you covered it. I mean, it's just good people interesting kind of vertical, right?
Yeah, I mean there's so much going on there and like there's so many different
Parts of the world that you would touch from like, you know
They do work with traditional art galleries and museums and they're doing a lot obviously
on chain and aetherium, but even you know
Across ecosystems and there's so many artists that you would get to interact with engage with and yeah
It's just the community is absolutely amazing. So
Yeah, see Jordan Lyle in the audience from prohibition
It's just like there's so many things our blocks is connected to that are just so cool that yeah
It would be a really fun place to work. I'm sure
Totally great answer I had not predicted that that would be your answer, but I definitely what did you put it on?
I thought you would go a little bit more DJN
I mean, that's more like cultured and I think very appropriate for sure
But I was expecting something more gambling oriented
Those are like the two wolves inside me one would be our blocks the other would be something full total DJN
Awesome well one other question here
I'm curious like I've asked this to a couple people behind the scenes
But if you were given essentially infinite money, or we'll just say like ten million dollars for for making it a little bit more clear
Specifically to acquire an existing PFP project you have seen many of them over the last three years
But your goal is to acquire one PFP project and try and turn it around in some way
What would you acquire assuming you you know were able to and the money was covered and then what would you do with it?
Like how would you turn it around?
That's a really good question
I'm trying to think through all the all so many PFP projects now
That are long long gone. You know what I would I would acquire super yetis
Because everyone who's an OG knows who they are. I would redo the art relaunch the collection and
probably run it back with something like the pudgy penguins or the chimpers playbook where it's an IP play and
do something that's you know community and IP and
Yeah, see if we could turn that around because there's
They were the the you know the pixel monkevens of 2021 was super yeti
so I think that you know that you would appeal to the OGs in the space and
You could drum up enough type and excitement from newer people and it's a good comeback story and narrative and yeah
Let's you know now. I kind of want to do it. Let's let's start a doubt about this
Yeah, well, we'll talk about this offline
Awesome no, there's definitely like
Misunderstanding I think of some of that IP that exists in crypto like Luca with penguins
Like is the obvious case study where he kind of purchased this thing that ultimately has a lot of value in mindshare and has turned
It into a wonderful company
But I think there's still a few other things that are hidden there
I've always thought tubby cats would be funny to go and like explore the whole toy company concept through that
But there's definitely a few more people dig around
I want to just be mindful. There's a couple people who have asked some questions
This is not related to much of anything
But you are being complimented for being a great speaker
And so this person is curious if that was like natural for you or if you ever kind of did anything to learn how to speak publicly
Do you have any thoughts to share on kind of public speaking at all?
well, first of all, thank you to the whoever said that I
Have never been much of a public speaker. I
I mean I was a degenerate poker player from and I'm mostly online like the player for most of my career
So I would just sit at home behind my computer screen
where or how why I've never really felt like a good competent speaker actually the first time I
crypto conference in NFT conference and I was a speaker was June 2022 was met Amsterdam and
I was giving a 20-minute keynote and I was I freaked out so much
I was like really anxious because the last time I'd spoken like in front of anyone prior to that was high school and
yeah, so that was wild and actually I remember in in 2021 I was I
Was so nervous and anxiety-riddled that I wouldn't even join Twitter spaces because I just I'm just not
I'm a very I'm very introverted and
May not be coming across but I'm very introverted and was very shy and anxious as as a kid and for most of my life
And I still feel that is who I am
and so I wouldn't join Twitter spaces and when I did I would never ever ever speak and I don't know what changed or
where or how or when it changed, but
at some point mid to late 2021 I just
Started doing more of it and then at some point I decided to start my own Twitter space and we're just like almost every single
Day have people on and I guess that trial by fire really helped turn things around
but I was is very much not natural and
You know step way out of my comfort zone. I guess did it long enough and
It's kind of like your your writing point I think anyway where it's just about reps like you have to just do it a lot
It's like not a sexy answer maybe but I think
There's something that you learn after spending a hundred hours talking to people in some sort of public forum that you can't really learn from a book
So yeah, it totally makes sense and I would agree
I have one final question for you before before we wrap it up
I'm curious like we talk a lot in crypto about this like quote-unquote mainstream adoption
And it gets bent in a lot of different directions whether that's like for venture people trying to justify
Investing in things or for the hope of our bags to go up to infinity blah blah blah
But I'm curious like how do you think about what mainstream adoption even is for crypto and to you like when will that have happened?
Is it that certain apps are used widely? Is it that coin prices have hit certain things like I'm yeah
I always like to ask people this question kind of to wrap it up
So any of your thoughts there would be fun
Yeah, it's a great question
It's hard to say when that will have happened, but maybe something along the lines of you know a
Billion people are interacting with blockchains on a daily basis one way or another and I think that will happen in many different ways
But it would probably the biggest way will be
people not even realizing they're interacting with a blockchain the technology will be so embedded into so many different applications and
Companies and things that people are using that it's just there in the background the way that so much of the technology
Undepitting the internet is there and people don't realize that they're interacting with
TCP IP or all these different protocols that are just in the background and that will come from
Warpcast built on Farcaster where you know you just download an app on your phone and jump in and all of a sudden you're interacting
On this decentralized social media platform and you have an ethereum wallet even if you don't know you have one
It's there ready and waiting for you
You know web3 games like there are actually really excellent fun games out there now that are
NFTs or web3 or blockchains like parallel is a really good example
It's a sci-fi trading card game that is genuinely fun and a lot of people play it
And there's there's so many more games coming out now like in 2021 people always said
You know gaming and NFTs are so crazy because it takes five years to build a triple-a game
It's some some of these companies have been building for five years now, and we've got those
Titles coming to market so you know people will be interacting with
blockchain in so many different ways
Art is another great example where already there's been so many including myself so many new people who are art collectors and art
appreciators that weren't five years ago because of
the the ease with which you can
Do it now like you know it's so
Filled to go into an art gallery in a like a real physical art gallery if you you know
Don't know what the hell you're talking about and like it's a difficult
Thing to learn like how do you look at art? How do you appreciate art?
How do you find artists? It's it was so difficult and now it's it's so accessible. It's just it's it's
Intertwining with everything so I think that
We will go mainstream like we're getting pretty close to mainstream already
I would say with like the ETFs and and and apps like what cast and so many other
You know ways that people can get a wallet without even knowing it so I think within a few years at all
We would have to admit that we've gone mainstream
Great answer man. No. I think that covers a lot of the core the core basis here
I was having a fun conversation yesterday
But how most people aren't having like very serious awareness of whether the software that they're using is using
AWS or Azure unless they're developers, right?
It's like one of these things where a lot of stuff gets abstracted away
And hopefully you can still keep some of the crypto spirit right of self sovereignty and like just being able to do cool stuff
On the internet, but I do think to get to that billion user number
Some of the yeah, some of the stuff is definitely gonna fade away
Awesome. Well as we wrap up here
I just want to say big thanks to everyone for for tuning in and encouragement to follows Enneka if you don't already follow his
Newsletter for whenever the next kind of burst of inspiration comes out
Take a look at Zen Academy and maybe poke your poke around there
And yeah, thank you to you, man
I really appreciate the time and it's fun to just have these conversations with people who've been around for a long time
No, thank you as well. It's been really really really fun
I think almost all the questions I wanted to turn around and asked you as well. Maybe we'll do that another time because
Yeah, I'm fascinated to know what you think on all these things as well
Awesome, man. We'll do it again sometime. Great. Well, we'll call it there
And I hope everyone has a good rest of the day and thanks again for coming through. Bye now