Bankless - 146 - Tim Ferriss on NFTs and 'Cockpunch'

Starting point is 00:00:06 Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Tim Ferriss is on the podcast. He's an award-winning writer, podcast with almost a billion downloads in a life hacker. He's here to give us his perspective on crypto, NFTs, and also to drop some alpha on his newest project, a project that very much is. involves crypto. And David and I think is going to take the world by storm. A few things to look for in this episode. Number one, is Tim all in on crypto now? We ask him that question. What does he think of crypto? Tim has an interesting perspective as both an insider in the space and an outsider.

Starting point is 00:00:53 A little bit of both. Number two, Tim's been head down full time on a secret NFT project for the last year or so. And it's got a bizarre name. What's this project about? When is it going to launch? Why has he spent the last year of his life on this project. We're going to talk about that in the project itself, which has a really cool approach. I don't think we've seen in crypto so far. And number three, Tim actually had money in FTX. So we ask him about that and ask if he's got any advice or perspective for us, for those of us who are down bad in this market. So make sure you stay tuned to the end of the podcast for that. Some excellent tips, some excellent coping mechanisms, both emotionally and I think from a financial perspective, too. So David, without revealing

Starting point is 00:01:32 too much about the NFT project that we're going to talk about, we'll leave that for Tim on the show, what should listeners know coming to this episode? I think the listeners should really pay attention to why Tim feels motivated to do an NFT project. And what about NFTs has captured Tim's mind? And the thing I'm really happy about is that what we're seeing here is NFTs, the technology, unlocking some, like, creative energy out of a huge, like, high performance individual. And listeners should know going into this episode that Tim has found a way to express himself as a creative individual, and he's using, of his own volition, NFTs to get that done. This is not your typical NFT drop. This is not Tim coming in and doing an NFT-P-P thing.

Starting point is 00:02:16 He has created a whole entire universe, and he's using NFTs as a technology to get that done. So I think this is going to be an interesting just like unpacking of somebody using NFTs to just do something that they want to do. And so that being the context, I think people might appreciate what he's up to in this NFT world further on into the show. We spent about 45 minutes, the first 45 minutes of the show, circling the NFT project that shall not be named, just getting context and getting Tim's history. But then at some point we just explicitly say, hey Tim, okay, what are the details? At that moment in time, if you have kids or other sensitive ears on the show, you might suggest skipping over that part because, as you can tell from the title of

Starting point is 00:02:57 this episode, it's not entirely appropriate. But I had a fun time, and Ryan and I were laughing our butts off, and so you probably will too. And of course, David and I give our full insights into the episode in an episode after the episode. We call the debrief, which is available for premium bankless subscribers. If you are a premium bankless subscriber, you can access that on the premium RSS feed. If you're not, click a link in the show notes, become one, and get access to that RSS feeds, all sorts of goodies for you in the debrief. I'm sure we're going to be saying some bad words on the debrief this time as well. All right, guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Tim Ferriss. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Starting point is 00:06:28 Bankless has some work to do to catch up, David. And he's also a prolific angel investor. He's on the cusp of talking about a secret NFT project doing a drop here. Didn't know he was a crypto guy, but maybe he is. We're going to discuss that and what he has planned for this drop. Tim, welcome to Bagless. How you doing, man? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thrill to be here. We are thrilled to have you, too. So both Dave and I were just talking. I think you got him into cooking. I think you got me into like the four-hour work week lifestyle, like there can be something outside of the grind that society prescribes to you. So we appreciate you. Thanks. Oh, well, I appreciate you guys,

Starting point is 00:07:09 man. Without readers, I'm not here. So I really appreciate it. So I want to start with this question. Maybe it's on people's mind as they're going at this episode on bankless with Tim Ferriss. Wait, is Tim a crypto guy now? I don't know that you have to be, but there's some kind of tribe affiliation, I guess, but describe your relationship with crypto. Are you crypto guy? I mean, there are some very technical, very deep experts in crypto. So I would say, I'll put it this way. I began acquiring crypto in late 2012, early 2013. So I have been, I suppose, on the playing field for a decent stretch of time and continued to be engaged pretty heavily all the way through the, let's just call it, 2017, 2017 excitement, and have stayed in. And then on the art side,

Starting point is 00:08:14 I have been engaged, very deeply engaged with art, broadly speaking, since I was a kid. I wanted to be a comic book penciler for about a decade and actually got paid as an illustrator through part of college, worked in various illustration and graphic design capacities all the way through college. Digital art entered the scene for me when I moved to Selangha Valley and was trying to support a number of digital comic book startups. The tech wasn't quite there, but I collected comic books as a kid and still have all of my thousands of comic books polybagged and backed to this day. Digital art as we're talking about it probably entered the scene for me early 2021. And I owe Kevin Rose thanks for that.

Starting point is 00:09:04 Also Katie Hahn. So Katie Hahn had a tutorial for me on my podcast. And then simultaneously Kevin started talking to me about, I suppose, some of the early days with respect to NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. And then things went from there. So I have collected and I've been engaged with crypto and blockchain since late 2012, early 2013. So what Ryan was trying to do right there and what I want to continue to do is everyone in crypto has kind of their archetype, their category. Yeah. So if I'm getting a sense of that, like not necessarily a crypto guy, but as soon as NFTs came on the scene, NFTs perhaps resonated with you a lot more. And

Starting point is 00:09:47 that's really what we saw out of 2021 is NFTs as a technology arrived and all of a sudden it brought in a lot more people and it sounds like that it brought you in because of NFTs. Is that right? I did. I would say NFTs were of interest to me and the technology layers were of interest to me. And so I've been engaged with that and Kevin and I always test, I shouldn't say always, but frequently test early tech. And what interested me about NFTs was, number one, I could see it being a huge catalyst for

Starting point is 00:10:23 both established artists and would-be artists to generate a lot of art and do a lot of experiments. So that was extremely exciting to me. Number two, JPEGs, pretty JPEGs are a very easy gateway drug and onboarding ramp to get Normies involved with blockchain technologies without bludgeoning them with really, really difficult technical details. So I saw it also as an easy way to open the end of the funnel to get more people who are non-technical muggles like myself involved with all these technologies. So that was the primary interest, I suppose. Those were the converging lines that pulled me in. So inside of the NF3, world. There's also like two kinds of people, right? There are some people who are like bullish on

Starting point is 00:11:18 NFTs because of like the broad general potential that it has to like change a lot of the monetization model of the internet. It's like an investable category. It's an investable industry. And then there's other people who are like actual artists who just see NFTs as a way to like monetize their art. It's just a tool for them to enable them to do the things that they do. Do you resonate with one persona more than the other? I would say, um, a boundary walker here. Okay. And that may come up later.

Starting point is 00:11:48 There's a great book called, Trickster Makes This World or Makes the World by Lewis Hyde that I highly suggest to people, but talks about these trickster archetypes, coyote, raven, et cetera, as boundary walkers, right? And I identify with that on a whole lot of levels, and here that's also the case. So I am interested in NFTs, broadly speaking, right? Could they replace car titles? Could they replace, let's just say, shipping around various collectibles whereby you could have, I'm making this up, but a wine collection that is enormous that is stored in one place and people can buy and sell and trade these items using NFTs in a verifiable way, including all of the possibilities for primary and then secondary sales slash royalties and so on. I am also bullish on the artistic side if secondaries and royalties can be sustained.

Starting point is 00:12:51 If there's a race to the bottom, and I understand the marketplace dynamics and economic incentives and market share drivers that apply pressure downward on all these things, then the artists disappear. That's just a foregone conclusion. So I would say TBD on that, but I'm interested in both for sure. What's really interesting, Tim, about your story so far is it's kind of similar to Kevin's, right? It's like when we've talked to Kevin on the podcast a couple times, this is Kevin Rose, of course. Yeah. He's talked about, I've been in crypto for a while, like, but I didn't really, I mean, it was okay, it was cool. I respect the technology, but I wasn't one of the money crypto type people.

Starting point is 00:13:31 Like, I was interested in Bitcoin, but like the use case didn't really appeal to me. Why? Because I have a bank account and like it kind of works okay and I don't need it. Still pretty hard to buy coffee with Bitcoin. Right. You still can't do that. And so for him, you know, I think you said before, even though he was sort of, you know, in from the very beginnings, it didn't capture his attention. He didn't go fully down the rabbit hole. For like, David and myself is probably a little different in that we're very excited about like the money application of crypto, but even more broadly, we think of this as like it's digital property rights for the internet. Exactly. Like, wow, what did we?

Starting point is 00:14:06 just create it. And so like money is just one app on this digital property rights system. But like the whole idea of social reorganization here around like things that you can value on the internet is super cool. Anyway, it feels like you're kind of in the camp of coming at it from like you're interested in these applications, but you didn't go full in body and soul until you saw this really cool way that creators are using the medium in this fantastic way. And that's why by the way, I know we're going to talk about your project. But it's very much it's an artist talking about this project and that's why you're in it. But yeah, what do you have to say on that? Well, what I was going to say is that I've dabbled in Defi, for instance, and I'm very

Starting point is 00:14:45 fascinated by it, but it's not a core area of expertise for me. Finance to begin with, financial instruments, derivatives, et cetera, are not a core competency of mine. I mean, I'm not completely financially illiterate, but I am not a finance person. And, therefore I tended to stay on the edges of that. I did experiment and I've used my own money, but I didn't go whole hog. I didn't feel confident enough to do that. Whereas NFTs and more broadly, and we'll talk about this probably, but once you start to expand and look at the potential of, say, storytelling and having various layers that intertwine one layer of which or one component of which is, artwork. Then we start to get very quickly into a Venn diagram of overlapping strengths and core

Starting point is 00:15:45 competencies of mine. And that, I think, is what has kept me up so many sleepless nights with hairbrained ideas. I think some amazing ideas, I just can't fucking sleep. That's awesome. Yeah, it's been the story of the last, I don't know, let's call it nine to 12 months. And I would just wake up in the middle of the night laughing, and I would have to, you know, at the time, turn to my girlfriend and just say, she'd be like, what are you laughing about? And I'd be like, you know what I'm laughing about. And she'd be like, oh, God, here we go. Once again. And that's exciting to me, right?

Starting point is 00:16:25 There's bad insomnia. And I suppose any insomnia, if it's night after night after night, ultimately gets bad. But there's bad insomnia where it's stress, anxiety. And then for me, there's this physiological quickening that is good insomnia where you just can't stop the ideas from coming related to some project you're really excited about. Yeah, it sounds like you got bit by the bug. Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I got bitten by the bug and I also had a number of bugs from Christmas past, meaning these latent passions that I have had for a very, very long time

Starting point is 00:17:00 that also woke up and bit me in the ass in a good way. Yeah, that's really cool. Another piece of this, because I know you've had many people from crypto on your podcast before, right? So you've had Katie Hahn, you mentioned, right? I think you did an episode with Chris Dixon and maybe it was. Also people like Vitalik has been on. So you've definitely heard the crypto perspective for a long time, but this is the thing that got you in. I'm also kind of looking for like maybe you're probably. So one thing about bank lists and I think about people who are crypto. So like David and I have been bitten by the bug for a while. and like it was defy and money and reorganizing the internet. But that can lead to a silo, right? That can lead to like we have this bubble around us of like permables. Like even in the wake of what just happened, Tim, like FTCS and all of that, we're like, this is good for crypto.

Starting point is 00:17:48 You know, because like it promotes decentralization. But I'm curious, kind of your perspective as you're sort of this boundary walker, as you say, can you get us in the head of like some of the things that give you trepidation about entering here? Because I sense that. When I was hearing you and Kevin talk about it on the proof podcast, I could get the sense that, like, there were some qualifiers from Tim. You're like, it's this type of NFT, but it's not this. And I don't want to make promises and guarantees. And like the speculative thing, it felt like to me, you weren't quite like, you didn't want to be associated with the scam element of crypto, which I totally understand. Or maybe I'm reading things into it. But tell me about your trepidations. Totally. I would say with respect to the many caveats that I gave in the pretext. Proof podcast with Kevin. It's not so much that I don't want to be associated with the scam elements. I'm not too worried about that. At least for anyone who has followed me for any period of time, I'm not worried about that. But I don't want people to buy my pretty JPEGs as investments. And who knows what the future may hold. But ultimately, I want people to view engaging with this as entertainment. All right, would you take your two kids to Disney World? Does that cost a few hundred bucks? Great. Will you potentially get that much entertainment out of this or two trips to Disney World? Maybe. Or if you go to a

Starting point is 00:19:15 Broadway show, how much does that cost with a few people, right? Or two nice dinners. Are you going to get, or three nice dinners? Like, do I think I can deliver that much entertainment for people that will not provide necessarily a financial return? I think that's a healthy way for me, to approach this rather than what a lot of people do, which is pump, pump, pump to the moon. This is going to be amazing. Oh, my God. Take out of the fourth mortgage. Sell your car. Forego your kids' college tuition. This is going to be a thousand bagger. I don't want to in any way imply that I can predict the future. And certainly, I don't think a lot of people could have predicted this past week with FTX. Some people perhaps had a window into the podcast.

Starting point is 00:20:02 possibilities, but very few people who we would assume are tracking the space incredibly closely could have predicted anything like this with any type of precise time frame, right? And I do think there are a bunch of ways that this could be good long term for a lot of ecosystems that we're all involved with. But the caveats, I would say, sort of lead into, and the hesitations come in a few different forms. On a personal level, I will say that a lot of what was old is now once new again in the sense that people are people, human nature is human nature and money is money on some level. And therefore, we're going to see a lot of the same bad behavior that we saw in the non-digital financial markets before there was regulation,

Starting point is 00:20:54 or let's just say some degree of competent regulation. And there are many forms as bad behavior can take. Let's just say we're going back to before any type of centralized banking, where people were stuffing dollars under mattresses and putting gold bars under their floorboards. What happens? People get robbed, right? As one example. And therefore, there's a part of me, and this is probably going to upset a lot of people listening. So I'll ask for forgiveness in advance. But there's definitely part of me that operates along the lines of thinking, you know, would I rather have Amazon see all of my purchase histories, or would I rather the entire internet see all of my purchase histories? Right. There's definitely part of me that's more comfortable with Amazon, with lots of

Starting point is 00:21:44 regulation, lots of internal rules, lots of policy, lots of, I know, internal yet centralized technology having a window into that. And I do know people who have had wrench attacks attempted on them. And for those who don't know, it's a really cheap hack. It's a $5 wrench. crowbar and using the threat of physical violence or real physical violence or the threat of physical violence against someone you care about to extract in this case, say crypto or assets that are denominated in crypto. So I am wary on some level of being my own bank. Now, it doesn't mean I'll never do it, but I do think there are some risks that for a lot of people are very abstract and low likelihood.

Starting point is 00:22:31 For a lot of people, the likelihood of them getting scammed or having their wallet drained is maybe the same likelihood of having a shark attack, right, getting their leg bitten off by a great white. For me or for anyone who's public facing,

Starting point is 00:22:46 I think the risk is actually pretty high. And therefore, I'm very, very careful about it. And I do think there will be decentralized options that are very attractive for some people, and there will be more centralized or maybe sort of medium-sized centralized options that are more appealing for others. So some of my hesitations are from a security standpoint. I mean, when concerns like this go from abstract for a lot of people to real, right? I've had death threats.

Starting point is 00:23:16 I've had people come to conferences with guns threatening to kill me. I've had bomb threats. I've had stalkers. I've had to escalate things to the FBI. Once those types of thing happened to you and your house is full of guns and so on. You just think about security risks a little differently. So those are some of my hesitations. Beyond that, I would say it's primarily like, look, and this doesn't relate to my project necessarily, but Web3 and Defi and all these things,

Starting point is 00:23:46 crypto in general, from a personal level, I think about security a lot, right? Multi-Sig, everything you can imagine. And then on the process, project side, I do not want people with poor impulse control or who have somehow become intoxicated with the space to view this as an investment. I just think that's a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Doesn't mean it couldn't go up. It might, but there's also a chance the thing goes to zero. I mean, just you can't tell in these markets and with so many, not only micro factors involved,

Starting point is 00:24:20 but macro factors that even, I mean, I know a lot of top investors globally, including some of the top macro guys in the world, it is hard for them to place bets right now. Very challenging. So TED Talk, complete. Thanks for listening. No, no. Like, that makes sense, Jim.

Starting point is 00:24:37 And I kind of get you on the money use case, right? So I think, you know, two things you emphasize that crypto hasn't yet solved. One is, like, on-chain privacy. That's just not trackable and traceable. It really hasn't solved that. So if that's a use case that's important to you, like, crypto really hasn't solved that in the money realm. And then the other is, like, good kind of, like, smart contracts.

Starting point is 00:24:55 wallet multi-sig so that you are more immune from wrench attack where you have some sort of social recovery that's maybe like a piece of your keys with a lawyer and like you know five other people so that it's just like you can't be wrenched attacked something like this but we're not there yet either yeah i mean i think that's coming but well you know the other piece i guess i wanted to talk about though is i really respect and get from a creator's perspective that you are playing the long game and always have. And so what I see in you and what I hear in you is you want to over deliver for your community. Anything that Tim Ferriss creates, you want to deliver more value than it costs people, right? And so that's why you don't want people to lose money. You don't want to over promise things.

Starting point is 00:25:38 In fact, what I hear from you often about this project that we're about to talk about in a little bit is a downplay of just like this thing could go to zero. Like don't buy it. Don't be in an infat. But let me ask you this question because this is key. At some level, Tim, isn't it out of of your hands? Like once this thing goes to market, that is the thing with defy. That's the feature and the good and the bad, which is like, Tim Ferriss can say all day, you know, Tim Ferriss is tweeting, this NFT is overvalued, don't buy it. This is absolutely ludicrous. These prices, don't believe me. And then somebody goes and is like, oh, Tim's downplaying it. That makes me so bullish right now. And they, like, bid up the price higher. Like, how do you control for that?

Starting point is 00:26:18 Tim said the word buy. I'm bullish. Don't buy this. What I heard, was buy. It is out of my control. Absolutely. It's 100% on my control. Really, all I want to be able to do, what I really, really hope I don't get, and there probably will be some of these where people are like, I just took out this loan or used my last few dollars to buy this JPEC. And I really hope A, B, and C, right? And if it doesn't go well, and I know this is like the anti-suff. sales bitch. But look, I'm trying to create something awesome, to be very clear, right? I think I've already created something that is actually pretty amazing. I'm very happy with it and proud of it. But if it doesn't go well and then someone's like, oh my God, my life is in shambles, I want to be

Starting point is 00:27:10 able to point back to at least me very publicly saying, do not buy this unless you have a hundred X the cost of this in your savings, a thousand X the cost of this. of this in your savings, right? Do not buy it at all, period. And do not view it as an investment, period, full stop. I want to be able to point back to me publicly saying that so that I at least feel like I've done what I can control. And that's just the messaging in the beginning. But yeah, once it goes to market, it's go totally out of my hands. I mean, you know, with bots and day traders and whatever, that's like, you know, I know people are going to come in to trade, but I want to feel like I have been as ethical and moral in how I've presented this

Starting point is 00:27:59 thing at the outset. You want a clean conscience here. Yeah, totally. And to your point, I'm also playing the long game. Yeah. I want to be creating more art for a very, very long time. And for those who don't know me, I mean, I've been in the game for a while now, right? first book came out 2007. Five books. And like you said, the podcast, close to a billion downloads now,

Starting point is 00:28:25 600, 700 episodes. I've lost count, something like that. So I have been in the game for a while, and I plan to be in the game for a long time. So we're kind of circling around the details of this drop, and I think we'll continue to circle at least for a little bit more because I got some more questions. I love the T's the four plus great. And also, guys, I want to say for you, I'm not in a rush. so we can just keep going. Oh, absolutely. I just want to make that clear because I know my answers

Starting point is 00:28:50 have been a little involved. No, that's great. I'm happy to be here. This is a long-form podcast. Let's keep going. One of the questions I have for you is like, well, when you commit to making an NFT, a token is a financial asset.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So whether or not you intend on people like investing in these things, the choice to make a financial asset is a choice. And so we'll kind of unpack what the utility of making these things into tokens unlocks. Yeah. But we'll kick that one down the road because I still have some other questions I want to get to.

Starting point is 00:29:15 Yeah. Something you said earlier resonated with me. I want you to unpack it a little bit. NFTs and tokens are really just like form factors. They're just vehicles for expression. And when I see Tim Ferriss, I see a guy who like really wants to express himself. Like if you look at your body of work, it's a bunch of different books across a variety of spectrums like optimizations, biomechanics, bioengineering, like workplace, how to work a full job

Starting point is 00:29:41 inside of four hours. And that's aside from all the podcast. Cooking. Yeah, right? Cooking. So, like, Tim is a super creative guy. And that's aside from all, like, the artistic side, right? The drawing and the graphic design.

Starting point is 00:29:50 And so I've always thought of, like, NFTs as, like, these new form factors to help artistic expression, cultural output. Yeah. And I'm wondering if that's also what you see and how you see NFTs and the intersection of just, like, cultural expression. Is that what NFTs are doing for you? And is that what you're trying to do with this project? Yeah. And I'm almost curious, like, what your NFT portfolio looks like a little bit. Like, not portfolio.

Starting point is 00:30:13 I'm using the wrong word, right? that's a stupid finance word. What does your collection look like? Yeah. Well, let's see. So on the creative expression side of the questions, I would say yes and yes. What's most exciting to me in my circle of friends about NFTs,

Starting point is 00:30:34 I mean, there are people who have done extremely well financially, and that's great. But these are generally people who are already doing pretty well financially. So you can only eat so many M&Ms. So that's not in and of itself very interesting. What's interesting in my circle of friends is musicians, graphic artists, designers who, during COVID through NFTs, were able to make a living and put food on the table and sock away some savings, maybe actually continue to make art even though they had to cancel touring with an ongoing royalty stream from art they were producing. that's interesting. All of a sudden these folks who had maybe been dominantly in one medium were suddenly creating pieces that were multimedia for the first time. And they were collaborating

Starting point is 00:31:25 with people. They never would have collaborated with otherwise. Meeting people, they never would have met otherwise. That is exciting. Just from the potential of some type of, this is going to be maybe strong statement, but some type of creative Cambrian explosion of sorts where you have all of these emergent life forms and creative art forms that you couldn't have predicted otherwise or couldn't have predicted, period. And then on the collection side of things, I have a, I think, beautiful collection of NFTs, and it's mostly inexpensive stuff or moderately priced stuff because I do not trade. I've never sold an NFT.

Starting point is 00:32:12 aside from my own, which... JPEGs? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, they're all JPEG. Because there's like music, NFTs, there's like gifts, but like JPEGs is mostly... I do have music as well, but in this case, I'm talking about visual, right?

Starting point is 00:32:25 Like, you can see behind me. Like, I care about the visual. Like, it's arts all over my house, and it's also mostly inexpensive. And the reason for that is, number one, I don't trade. The only NFT I have sold is actually one I've sold through Grail

Starting point is 00:32:42 and Kevin Rose, which was my first ever published fiction short story, which was part of the Grail season one. But of my personal collection, I've never sold anything. And I would say a few that come to mind for me that I really have enjoyed. Meridians, I think, are stunning. Some of them, in particular, the ones that have ended up looking something like Chinese watercolor landscape paintings are just, I think, mesmerizing. Clonex caught my attention very early and opened my mind and my eyes to what could be potentially done with 3D art and me bits prior to that, but I don't own any meabits. And there are many others. They are almost entirely things that pass a sniff test for me, and this is going to sound so primitive.

Starting point is 00:33:40 And the sniff test is, would I ever take this and blow it up to several feet by several feet and stick it on a wall in my house where I look at it every day? Would I do that? Yes or no? Pass or fail. Tim, do you know that I have a five foot by five foot crypto punk blown up on my wall in my apartment? Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So that's a great example. Cryptopunks, I mean, look, Larva Labs, and just from an innovation perspective, and, you know, guys who have set trends in motion that were never maybe intended to be trends. And holy shit. I mean, they've done amazing, amazing work. So, you know, I track what they do.

Starting point is 00:34:19 But those would be a few examples. It's all stuff that I like to look at. So it's all visual for you, Tim. You're not, like, looking at the community. Or are you, like, also doing, I don't know, investigation on the artist, like, whether you kind of vibe with the artist? Or is it purely just the very? I like this thing. I've studied a lot of the artists and have been lucky enough to spend time with people like Tyler Hobbes. I think Fidensas are fucking gorgeous. I don't know if I'm allowed

Starting point is 00:34:46 to curse. Hopefully, I'm from Long Island. I apologize. You can bleep those out. This is crypto, my friends. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Not the right business to be in if you don't like lots of acronyms and lots of cursing. So I am interested in the artist. I've spent time with a bunch of artists and have gone to now the first and second Marfa, Texas meetups, hosted by Snowfro and Art Blocks and have spent a lot of time with artists. So I am interested in that, but I'm not primarily, the art has to be good for me, right? I mean, I've designed every one of my book covers outside of Tools of Titans. Like I sketched and hand drew out, I laid out all the specs, of course, had a professional, polish it and make it suitable for printing. I'm

Starting point is 00:35:32 so, maybe people won't get the reference here, but monkish, meaning I'm so OCD with my visual acuity. If I go to somebody's house to have dinner and a painting or a photo on the wall is slightly crooked, like I'll get up and I'll correct it. I'm very sensitive. I'm very sensitive. I'm that that fucking guy. I'm very sensitive. So if somebody just takes, you know, a bunch of otter shit and smears it on a wall and sticks like an LED spinner next to it, and then they have a four-page explanation for why this is art and why people should care about it. I'm not interested. Does that make sense? Like the visual component has to have something redeeming about it. And that's just my programming. I can't evade that. So yes, it matters, but I'm also studying the artists. I'm also

Starting point is 00:36:31 studying older artists. Actually, that red book, if you can see it right up there, that's a book on Rodan, the famous sculptor who made The Thinker, among other things. And I study a lot of older artists I have for a long time. I study comic book artists. I mean, I just interviewed Todd McFarlane on my podcast. We did two episodes that when we're recording this. They haven't yet come out, but childhood hero, amazing comic book artist, reinvented the amazing Spider-Man, created Spawn. I mean, the guy's a legend. So I do study all of that, including a lot of Japanese influences, too. I've spent a lot of time in Japan.

Starting point is 00:37:12 I lived in Japan. I collected Japanese comic books, read and write Japanese, right? So I'm paying attention to all of that. The communities are interesting to me. So I have studied, for instance, Yuga and Board Ape Yacht Club. I don't own any apes. Sadly, miss that boat. But I find what they're trying to do interesting.

Starting point is 00:37:34 I find some of the CC-Zero stuff interesting. And I've looked at how that has begun to play out in different ways. I find what nouns and nouns down, doodles and so on are doing really interesting. But I suppose where I lean is a little closer to the Disney Yuga side of things and further away from the CC-Zero, from a creative standpoint. You're talking about IP, like licensing, how you view that lens on it? I'm not necessarily talking. I mean, I am talking about IP. Yes, that's a piece of it.

Starting point is 00:38:07 But I'm talking more about creative, the core of the, like, who decides the core and the kernel of the creative genesis. and I do think that very often, I'm not going to get the attribution on this. I don't know who originally said this, but a camel is a horse designed by committee. And you got to be careful with crowdsourcing your creative decisions. You can have feedback and input and pay attention to that, which is something I've done forever, right? A lot of blog posts ultimately led to books from geek to freak, which was my first blog post to go super viral. I forgot about that, my thousand plus blog posts. that I've put up since 2005 or six. Yeah, did those too. But geek to freak, that post was the

Starting point is 00:38:55 initial market testing and genesis of the four-hour body, which came out in 2010 and became a number one New York Times bestseller. So I pay attention to what people react to and respond to and the feedback, but I think allowing the crowd to dictate your creative decisions is generally a terrible approach. Yeah. So I think of a lot of designers like this. One figure, the archetype stands in mind is like it's a Steve Jobsian way to kind of design where there is a decision maker. Yeah. And like if you had tried to design the original iPhone without a Steve Jobs visionary, who's the final decider, it would have just never done anything. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I'm not, I don't want to compare myself to Steve Jobs. I think that would be the pride coming before the fall.

Starting point is 00:39:43 but don't buy Tim's NFTs. Don't buy them. Don't buy my NFTs, but I will say that I do think for me and for a lot of projects, not all, not all, not all, but especially if you're trying to do what I'm doing, which is, and we'll get to this, I'm sure,

Starting point is 00:40:00 but what I'm calling an elf project, an ELF, emergent long fiction project, there has to be someone in the driver's seat. There has to be, or it just becomes spaghetti. And it's just like a narrative made of spaghetti and it turns into a complete shit show. It is my opinion. So I think we're starting to get further into the details of this NFT project. So maybe we'll unpack that angle of it just one last time before we actually go into the details.

Starting point is 00:40:30 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not in any rush. What is your role in this project? Are you like the creative director? Are you like the mastermind, the orchestrator? Like how would you describe your role in this project and how many other people are also working on this with you are like how big is this team yeah team is team is tiny but just for reference right because let's say a lot of top podcasts out there have teams of 30 40 people now and i have are you

Starting point is 00:40:59 serious yes yeah they have huge huge teams and they they also build out and most podcasts now if they want to compete i have not done this because i refuse but are becoming television shows. So I know of podcasters who are spending, and these are, I don't think even top 100 podcasters on Apple rankings, who are spending $5 to $10 million on build out of studios, and they are hiring 10, 20 people at a time to build out. That's not always the case, but I just bring that up to say, I have one full-time employee who works on my podcast. It's me and this one-time employee. And we have all contractors. For those people who wonder, does Tim walk the walk of things in the four-hour work week with respect to architecture and lien operations and capital allocation with

Starting point is 00:41:54 distributed talent? Yes, I do. I have one full-time employee working on the podcast. I have another part-time, and then I have lots of contractors who are excellent at what they do. So to come back to your question on this, I have one person who is a full-time employee who is allocating a lot of time to this right now and probably will continue to do so. I am spending right now the majority of my time on this and have been for a while. And then I have contractors. And that's it. I'm not building out a startup operations team with a roadmap and a Discord and a community manager. I am not doing that. I refuse. I think it's foolish in most cases. I think it's putting the cart before the horse and uploading a lot of cost to mollify loud people on the internet who should not be dictating

Starting point is 00:42:50 your business or creative decisions. That's my feeling. And it's unnecessary in most cases. So the team is lean. Who am I in this entire thing? I would say creator. Right. So all of the conceptual framework around it, all of the writing so far is from me. The writing that has yet to come out, right? I mean, I've put together quite a bit for myself. The maps, I've drawn all the maps myself, and they're being put together by someone who's professional. But this is literally my sketchbook that is on my desk, aka kitchen table. And so I'm the creator. I'm the writer. I am the benevolent dictator and very heavily involved with the artwork, very, very, very heavily involved the artwork. But I recognize my own limitations. And for the type of artwork

Starting point is 00:43:51 that I've teased already, if people are paying attention, the level of detail is beyond belief. I have not seen anything like it in the space. I mean, I don't think I've seen anything like it, period, maybe outside of some animated features, not to say these are animated, but just the depth of detail on 3D figures that are going to be presented in the NFTs as two dimensions. I have not seen anything like it. Very involved with that. I mean, twice weekly art reviews providing references and direction, indicating the types of weapons and armors that should and should not be included with different clans or greater houses.

Starting point is 00:44:31 it's become very elaborate. It's very, very, very, very elaborate, which I'm excited about and I'm having a lot of fun with. So since this is giving me so much energy, I'm going to turn around and pour that energy right back into it. So the word world building definitely comes to mind. I don't think very many NFT projects have ingredients that require a significant amount of writing, for example.

Starting point is 00:44:56 That's like a new element that I don't see many NFT projects have. It's a lot of fucking work. Right. Yes. Yeah. It's not just like, oh, let me like have a bunch of attributes and slap them and see if the combinations work. There's like a whole universe that it seems like you're creating. When or what inspired you to do this? Because like Tim, you're a busy guy. There are a variety of choices of time well spent that you could choose. But yet you seem to be, this kind of seems like it's like living in your brain rent free and you're going to do this thing until it doesn't do that anymore. When did this idea come to you and why have you decided to spend so much time? here. I'd say the original sparks and seeds were more than Eurio. I'd say maybe 14 months ago, if I'm looking at the timing. Yeah, 14 or 15 months ago. So a while. And it just kind of spun out of control from there, and it got so ridiculous. And all of these ideas were constantly popping up and preventing me from going to sleep. And I thought, you know, this doesn't happen to me that often. maybe I should pay attention to this as completely absurd as it seems,

Starting point is 00:46:05 and at least start putting things down on paper, ideas, sketches, so that in case it goes somewhere, at least I have a little bit of momentum. And then when I started to expand the scope of my imagination and ambition a little bit, and I thought, all right, how could I make this more dynamic? How can I make this a lot more interesting and engaging? How can I create different warring clans and houses that have various alliances and intertwined histories and longstanding conflicts and different degrees of access to various natural resources, for instance, different types of expertise, different religions, different belief systems,

Starting point is 00:46:56 different systems of magic. I think there'll probably be soft systems and not hard systems for you, Brandon Sanderson fans out there. It just got fucking crazy. And then it just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. And I was like, okay, I'm getting so much energy from this. And quite honestly, last year and a half was incredibly difficult for me, incredibly difficult and I just seem to be getting cockpunched over and over again where we have like people,

Starting point is 00:47:32 you know, people dying literally who I know and then like a five-year relationship ending and like just crazy things happening. Lost a ton of money with this FTX stuff recently. I mean, just like hit after hit after hit after hit. And I was like, you know what? Maybe as one of the musician once said to me, like, take the pain and wear it like a shirt. Amanda Palmer was. So somebody called her Amanda fucking Palmer over and over again. So she took it and she literally put Amanda fucking Palmer on the shirt and started asking people to call her that. And I was like, that's very clever. You're like taking the thing that hurts and turning it around into something that gives you energy. So this project in a way became that in part because I realized also

Starting point is 00:48:16 it was a hand-in-glove fit with what I was thinking about anyway. And, and And so, yeah, that's the long story long of how a lot of this came together. And then I would say for the last six months especially, like, this has been what I spend the majority of my time on. It's kind of, I mean, I have to laugh thinking about the whole thing. But I can't really help myself because it is what's giving me the most energy. And if I do the thing that gives me the most energy, that transfers to everything else. Yeah, I'm having a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:48:50 So until that changes. I'll keep going. So, Tim, what piece of it, especially, is giving you energy, right? It's like, I think of different world builders, right? You think of kind of like a Tolkien, for example, classically. Yeah. He, like, I mean, the guy created languages before he even wrote kind of the

Starting point is 00:49:05 five or six languages, right? That's like a world building extraordinaire. Which I've also studied just as a side of it. Okay, so this is great. So like, is it. Glossopoeia, I think it is called, the creation of languages. So what piece of this is most exciting for you? Is it because I know there's an art component.

Starting point is 00:49:21 there's a world building component. You called this ELF, and remind us again what that stands for, there's like this fiction component. Emergent long fiction project. Okay, so say that. Because this isn't a PFP. This is not a PFP project. And emergent implies that it's not here 100% all of the way. Like it's going to kind of emerge over time.

Starting point is 00:49:40 And long form, of course, is like long term. And then it's fiction. It's clearly pretty well. So long form means higher volume than most projects are willing to put into writing. Okay. So it's more a volume thing than a duration thing. But the way I've been thinking about it, let me answer your first question first. What's most exciting about me?

Starting point is 00:49:59 I am able to take something that I've loved my whole life, which is art, specifically creating art, not just looking at art, making art. And if people go back on my Instagram long enough, you can see some of that. And resurrecting that, giving the fuel necessary to let the Phoenix rise. from the ashes of this thing that I discarded in a way after college because it seemed not grown up enough. Like, okay, now I need to get a job and make money and do this thing and drawing. Like, it was fun, but it's not really helping me go to where I need to go next. So let me put it to the side. And then I put it to the side and I have really not picked it up much since then

Starting point is 00:50:45 because I don't have real accountability, even if I have a teacher, which I've done in several cases. I don't really have timelines or deadlines. That changes once you have a project to launch. Now you have a team. Now you have deadlines. Now you have Slack. Now you have calendar reminders. And that forces me to engage with art, which is great. So those are some productive constraints that I've applied. That also then applies to something I've explored a little bit in the last year or two and have loved and really want to explore more, but it's hard to create the time or justify creating the time if it's just a side hobby, and that is fiction. That is world building. I've always been a huge fantasy and sci-fi nerd. I still have all of my materials from my D&D

Starting point is 00:51:32 days as a kid. I mean, I literally have, I don't know, hundreds of modules that I spent all my allowance and, you know, part-time busboy work money on. And read classics. Everending story. It was my favorite book as a kid. Love Tolkien. Love Ursula K. Le Guin. Wizard of Roosie. Go read it if you haven't read it. And dozens of others, right? Philip Pullman, to use a more kind of contemporary example, incredible. And if you want sci-fi, I'm not doing sci-fi, just to be clear, but go get exhalation, which is a short story collection by Ted Chang or his previous collection, one of the short stories from which was made into or adapted into a rival, one of the, I think, greatest sci-fi movies of the last five to ten years. Okay. So I wanted to do fiction, and this gave me the incentive and the deadlines and the

Starting point is 00:52:29 accountability to write a bunch of fiction. And to get better at it, you don't get better unless you're practicing. And I have gotten better. I've gotten a lot better just in the process of putting the stuff together. And the world building and the fiction is exciting to me for what reasons. The first is because I get to surprise myself. And this will lead into your question about ELF and why emergent is important. With fiction, I get to surprise myself. With nonfiction, right, five books, they're huge. I mean, you guys know, because I showed you before we started recording, I needed to elevate

Starting point is 00:53:02 my mic, so I just stuck two books under it, two books of mine, each of which is like six to seven hundred pages long. It's a lot of hard work, but there are very, very few surprises. I outline these books meticulously. I have a blueprint. I execute to plan. And there are surprises for the reader, but there are very few surprises for me. It's mostly brickling. And that's great, but I prefer to try something new. And in fiction, there are many ways to write fiction. And I'm still learning this, right? I am a novice, although I'm very happy with what's come out of my brain so far with enough caffeine and maybe the occasional glass or two of wine. But with fiction, there are a lot of ways you can approach it. Some people spec everything out in advance. With this, I wanted to set some initial conditions, characters, clans, conditions meaning landscape, territory, constraints, and then to start writing and see what happens. And that's what I'm doing. So it would be akin to, let's just say,

Starting point is 00:54:11 taking a trip to Europe with five friends. And you decide on a few things in advance. It's going to be the five of us. We're going to land in Spain and we're going to walk to the east. There are some constraints. No flights allowed. And people can fall from the group or be added, but it can never exceed 10 people, let's just say. And so on and so forth. And then you just set out and you see what adventures and misadventures develop. That's what I'm going to be doing with the writing. The long fiction comes in because I want to set a quantified bar that prevents people from casually using this label when they are not putting in the requisite work. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:55:00 I thought a lot about this. And I may have some more rules that I set for myself related to this, so it'll develop over time. So it's the E-Elf emergent, emergent, longed fiction. But so the long fiction to me right now means if you look at most, say, anthologies that collect short stories, and there are many of them, most short stories, not all, there are some exceptions, but will not exceed 5,000 to 10,000 words. So what I decide to do then is say, all right, if 10,000 words is the cutoff for short story,

Starting point is 00:55:38 that's the beginning, that is the starting point for long fiction. So if you are going to have an emergent long fiction project, that means you have put in the work before you launch to have 10,000 words minimum of polished prose. That means you cannot say, this is an emergent long fiction project, this is an L-fiction project, and you throw up one page of half-assed lore on your website and then say the rest is coming later. That doesn't work. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean that in my case, I'm going to be putting out all 10,000 words that I have immediately, right? So there's a little bit of wiggle room here, but I do have that much done. And we'll see where it goes. I'm definitely not promising that I'm going to be writing, you know, the next Game of Thrones series

Starting point is 00:56:33 or anything like that. It's almost certainly not going to have an output like a novel. It's going to be very, very different. And what happens at launch and what happens over that opening month will inform a lot of the decisions I make. How do people engage with the Easter eggs and the mysteries and the weird bits that are already baked in? And they are already baked in. How do they engage with that? What do they find? What do they not find?

Starting point is 00:57:01 What's too confusing? What isn't confusing enough, right? What is, which clans develop the most incredible communities, right? Do people actually gather around this, this clan identification? If so, what happens? And so on and so forth. That will inform the emergent properties of this long fiction, which is absolutely an attempt at coherent world building. David, I don't know about you, but I feel sufficiently teased at this point. The conversation. So, yeah, we're 55 minutes into this podcast. I don't think we can go any further without the bankless nation starting to get mad at us.

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Starting point is 01:00:23 Tim, what the hell is it? All right. What's going on? All right. So, uh, this makes me laugh. First of all, can we start with the name? Yeah, we can. You know, It's like me cracking up just like thinking about how to present this is part of the reason why I'm doing this, right? It's like, oh dude, we're already thinking through like the, I'm so childish. But it's, no, we're thinking through the episode title. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:51 Like how full frontal do you want it to be? So, so the name of this project is cock punch. No, it's not. Yes, it is. The name of the project is cockpunch. Wait, wait, wait. Cock as in Rooster kids, all right? Or like adults, hopefully if you're listening.

Starting point is 01:01:09 Just cock as in rooster for the rest of the session. So the name is Cockpunch. And I do have Cockpunch.com and at Cockpunch on Twitter. And these are going to be very important. So the name of the project is Cockpunch. The full name is The Legend of Cockpunch. And all of the known characters who inhabit the... realm are roosters. And there are anthropomorphized roosters. There are eight greater houses,

Starting point is 01:01:40 as I mentioned. So the roosters are the NFTs? The roosters are the NFTs. And the Cox. Yes, and the cocks. And there is, I won't give away too much because this is going to come out in the podcast. So we haven't talked about that. I am launching a new podcast. The Cock Punch podcast. Which will be called Cock Punch, possibly the legend of Cock Punch. And I have already hired voice actors, very good voice actors, to act as the narrators for the reading of the histories and the bits and pieces of mysteries and so on that will be put out as podcast episodes. Wow. All right. So why is it called cockpunch?

Starting point is 01:02:26 That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. Great question and fair question. It's called cockpunch because at one point in the realm's history, there was a warring states period. And there's a lot before and there's a lot after. But the important piece that I'll disclose here is that there was a warring states period where civil strife ruled. And it was chaos from all four corners of this realm to the center. And then there was a means of peacekeeping, devised.

Starting point is 01:03:00 and agreed upon, which was similar to the Olympics for humans, in the sense that the Olympics are effectively geopolitics and warfare by other means. And nations attempt to exert and prove supremacy through athletes. So now in this realm there is a what's called FTZ or the free trade zone, and that is a demilitarized zone within which there is an arena. And in this arena, you have one-on-one battles. And the battles include combatants from these eight-grader houses who have proven their medal through qualifying rounds of competitions in these various territories owned by the eight-grade houses.

Starting point is 01:03:47 Wait, are we cock-fighting? Well, we're cock-punching and cock-fighting. Cock-punching. Yeah, yeah. So you have, I mean, they could be cock-fighting, yes. So you have in this huge arena, imagine a sports arena where you could have like 100,000 spectators, you have two cockpunchers march out,

Starting point is 01:04:06 much like they would at like a WWE event. Right, right. Coliseum type thing. Coliseum, and they meet in the middle on an elevated platform, and each of them have a gauntlet, like a power gauntlet on one arm. As one does. And they punch the shit out of each other, and they have different strategies.

Starting point is 01:04:28 They have different strengths. They have different weaknesses. They have different capacities. Sorry, are these are all attributes in the NFT? Like strengths, weaknesses, attributes. Is that what they are? No, they're not all embedded in the NFT. So the visual components are and the traits are. And there are a lot of traits. I think we have close to 300 traits. It's absurd how much time I've put into this. And I mean, I've gone through every single one. not just on the visual piece, but also on the naming conventions and everything. So they fight, and the narrative is going to be what bolsters all of this with some of these additional details that I'm mentioning later, right? So people have to pay attention. And part of the reason that I hope people will pay attention is that, yes, if you are a

Starting point is 01:05:16 traitor and a speculator, and no judgment there, that's fair game. As long as you're not a complete dick on the internet, I have zero. tolerance for that. Like if you're just playing the game and you're playing the financial game, that's fine. Although I'll probably exclude marketplaces that push to zero and I will probably make it explicit that anyone who tries to circumvent secondaries, I reserve the right to block completely from anything I do and any, including any future projects to the extent that I can. And if anyone's an asshole, I'm just going to block them in every way conceivably possible. I think that one of the cultural norms. And I do think a culture is whatever, let's see, a culture is

Starting point is 01:06:00 whatever the worst behavior is that you'll accept. I'm paraphrasing a tool Gawande, but I really want this community to be fun and supportive and not what you experience day to day on Twitter, if possible. And I will enforce that. However, if you are trading. One thing I want to make explicit is that, yes, I'm sure that some value will be attributed to rarity traits, and people will sort by that as quickly as possible. But what happens then if, say, I take some not extremely rare traits, but I tie them into the narrative in some way that makes them very valuable? What happens then? I don't know. Never seen it done. So I'm curious to see if I decide to do such thing, what happens? Like, what happens in the activity? So, Tim, I'm kind of

Starting point is 01:06:55 confused here. Is this like, because you said there's a bunch of lore, you've written a ton of words to go with this universe. There are these things that happen. There are these cocks that punch each other. So say I'm a user. I've bought a cock puncher. That's the thing you buy, right? Is the, you buy the cock. You buy the rooster. Yeah, you buy the rooster. It doesn't have traits, but that's the art piece, right? That's the NFT piece here. Well, it does have traits, just to be clear. Like there are weapons, there are attributes that will have varying degrees of rarity. But it would not have, it would not indicate in the NFT what, say, the defensive capacity is of your particular character. That is going to be decided by yours truly in some fictional narrative way.

Starting point is 01:07:38 Okay. So, like, am I, as an NFT, cockholder, am I going to www. hashtag cockhol? Cockholt punch, doc. Am I going to a website? and like my NFT shows up and then it walks into like the Coliseum and then it fights? No. No.

Starting point is 01:07:55 How do I receive this story as a user? Podcast. You receive the story through the podcast, which will also be published as text, probably on my, on Tim. Dot blog, which for a long time was one of the most popular blogs in the world. It may still be. I mean, people have forgotten about blogs, but there's still a thing. So probably will be published in text there.

Starting point is 01:08:16 And which, by the way, will mean. I'm not just preaching to the choir, right? Like, what I'm doing is going to be routinely exposed to the mainstream, which I, which just makes me laugh all the more. But to be very clear, I'm not saying, I've built a metaverse and you go to this place and you authenticate and you log in and suddenly like you throw on your Oculus and you're suddenly in the head of your cock and you go out and you fight. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Starting point is 01:08:50 None of that. None of that. Okay, but how do I see what? Hold on, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let me, let me, I am going to ask lazy fuckers out there to use the most incredibly powerful imaginative computer on, on the planet. And that is in between their two ears. It's going to be very old fashioned. But guess what? You're going to have to visualize a lot of this folks. And it's going to be fucking awesome. It's old fashioned, right? It's not like porn hub plus holograms plus NFT JPEGs. It's not that. It's not that. It's not that. engaging from like an immediate dopamine like OCD ADHD perspective, but I'm putting in the heavy lifting so that it will engage the thing between your ears a lot more. So that is the plan. And look, I mean, if I'm not comparing myself to any of these people, but it's like there's a lot of power between those ears, right? If you look at what Harry Potter did, what Game of Thrones has done, what certain cartoons have done, right, with certain comic strips. have done, what certain comic books have done, you don't need automatically a lot of bells and whistles.

Starting point is 01:09:56 It starts with the lore. I mean, that's what it starts. It starts with the writing. It starts with the writing. Okay, but as an NFT holder, like, will my cock be able to punch Ryan's? Like, is that something that can happen in your mind? In your brain, it will, David. But as an event on Ethereum. Yeah. As an event on Ethereum, TBD. Okay. Again, you know how I'm, I'm, so tentatively waiting into these waters. I don't want anyone to buy a cock, to buy a cock puncher thinking, Tim's talking about this amazing roadmap on bankless, therefore, like, my kids' college fund can wait because I'm going to 10x this with cock punch. It's called cockpunch people, just to be clear, like if you're not getting the transmission, all right? So just keep that in mind.

Starting point is 01:10:49 should be shamed if buying it. What are you even thinking? You should be, you should be, if you get one, okay, don't buy one of these things unless you're giggling like a fucking idiot like we are. Oh, I am. Because, because, because that means maybe, maybe there's a chance that whatever you spend, you'll get back in the entertainment and the giggles and the soul-enriching chuckles along the way. Okay, so I'll just say that. The event piece, it is, something I am thinking about. I've been thinking about. I've tracked a lot of projects who've done this with on-chain dynamics or mechanics rather. My rule of thumb with this is whenever possible, make it simpler. Make it simple. Make it simple. I have seen what I consider otherwise very

Starting point is 01:11:41 interesting projects bury themselves in complicated mechanics and confuse the shit out of anyone who's trying to buy or use their NFTs, I don't want to do that. My hope is that I can do some very interesting stuff, but I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel with my smart contract. It's not going to be, I know I'm using a lot of quotes here, but one guiding light I've also used is a quote that I got from Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker who did supersize me, an inside man. Great show, by the way. And he said, once you get fancy, fancy gets broken. And that's with gear in the field for videography. I agree with that with everything. And so will there be at some point the possibility of David, your cock puncher,

Starting point is 01:12:28 attacking Ryan's cockpuncher and having him defend, you know, defend himself, Perry and return maybe some incredible magically powered boot to your balls and send your cock flipping over backwards? Never say never. Tim, I feel like I'm getting pumped. Possibilities, though. You're not getting punked. This is where the emergent comes in. I do not want to lock myself into anything.

Starting point is 01:12:56 Because what I have found so far, even in the development of this project, if I had tried to internally set a creative roadmap for this, I would have screwed this whole thing up. I would have screwed the whole thing up. I do think there's a non-zero chance that people will be able to fight or compete at some point. But I'm not promising that.

Starting point is 01:13:16 All right. So, Tim, can you give us a tease here, Tees of the Cox. Oh my God, don't say that. I'm not going to say it. You got to say it. Can you give us a little...

Starting point is 01:13:25 This is a little... I can't do. Little co-tees. No, no, a ruse of the teas, okay? A ruse and teas. Of the artwork. I want to see some art. So I just want to say,

Starting point is 01:13:35 from the get-go, I didn't even tell Kevin the name of this project because, like, the memetic potential energy in the name Cockpunch, is fucking irresistible. Like, I knew that it was just going to unleash a tsunami of childish behavior that would make me laugh and would make other people laugh and would just suddenly cause this proliferation of things like cock tease.

Starting point is 01:14:05 For instance, just as an example, I blocked someone from the at cock punch account today. I only have come across one troll, which is pretty astonishing, given that, you know, you know, the sandboxes that I'm playing in right now. And I was like, you know what? He just got cock blocked. And there's just so many options for incredible memes. So yes, cock tease. What type, all right, yeah, so I don't know how I will best share some of this, but I can show it to you on my phone. If you have anything that we can show on screen too. Like, we can have editors, like put some art. I can send it to us after the fact. Because these are like, I just want people, we're not talking about your average-looking rooster. No, we're not. Right. So, you even tell. I'm thinking of a

Starting point is 01:14:51 cartoon rooster with a big, thanos-like glove. Gontlet. Yep. So, so let me show you, I'll show you, this would be hard to see, but I'll show you some things. We'll take the J-Pag and put it on. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to show you a couple of teasers. Are these co-c on its, are these? Tim's shown a stick-pitch. We got, like, we got these, right, which are various teasers. And what's important to note about these, I know it's hard to see, is that what's incredible about these oh man the oh I don't want to be kicked by those

Starting point is 01:15:21 resolution those are frog feet this rotates wow that's a mask that's a wolf mask this is way more a 3D than I thought it would be yeah it is the very 3D so this is a gauntlet that will probably be punched by that

Starting point is 01:15:34 wow no which will probably or shot by it this is a dachi which is a type of Japanese sword that will be involved and I'll show you another one I'll show you, say, an archetype of one. So one of the spellcasting clans will have this kind of look. Wow.

Starting point is 01:15:56 You have like mages? Like there's going to be cockmages? We do have mages. Wow. We have cock mage. And so all of the teasers I just showed you. I want to be a cock mage. Who doesn't want to be a cockmage?

Starting point is 01:16:11 So at the end of this conversation, it'll be pretty funny when you get a transcript just in the intro you could say be forewarned we did a search on the transcript and we do say cock 70 4 times people are very clear it only means rooster it only means rooster it only means rooster so so those teasers that I showed you I'll give you a peek behind the

Starting point is 01:16:30 curtain here which gets me very excited those were all generated by moving cameras and lighting within 3D modeling software with the 3D files every one of these NFTs will ultimately have

Starting point is 01:16:46 a 3D file available and you'll be able to rotate 360 degrees around your character. All of those teases, which I think look incredible. I mean, they look cinematic, were made simply by taking something that could be a random generation and moving cameras and lighting around, like doing a photo shoot basically with a 3D character. That is so cool. So it's very involved. And I want to be very upfront and saying the 3D files are huge. They're like, a lot of them are, one to two gigabytes. So those will probably not be available for at least two to four weeks after mint. It's just too gigantic. And we also think about this. We're not just looking at identifying, say, clipping issues with generations in 2D. When we need to do quality assurance on a

Starting point is 01:17:36 3D file, we need to look at it from 360 degrees horizontally and from the top and possibly from the bottom. So it's really, really labor intensive. I love how like the first half of this podcast was like Tim Ferriss, like he's this multidisciplinary guy. He's got this idea. He's like doing this long form lore world building. He's putting so much effort into it. It's called cockpunch. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So like what does owning one of these NFTs unlock for me as an owner? Yeah, what it unlocks for you is this. You get a very amusing and pretty JPEG, although ultimately there will be these larger files,

Starting point is 01:18:24 so it's not exclusively JPEGs, but you get this NFT, and it gives you skin in the game to be invested in engaging with a very, I hope, entertaining experiment in real-world fantasy world building where you can interact with the community. So it's a, I can express my interest in this world.

Starting point is 01:18:49 And as like if I'm hearing this podcast, reading this world, I can imagine my cock. Right. Yeah. And look, there may be more stuff later. I don't know. Okay. But I do not want to be one of those people who's like, this is a utility NFT and you're going to unlock this and this.

Starting point is 01:19:09 And here's the 12 month roadmap. Sure. I don't want to be that guy, so I'm not going to be that guy. It's just a visual representation. It's a visual representation and TBD, if anything else. But the artwork, I think, is, I think it is more detailed than anything I've seen in the space. It is more detailed than a lot of what I've seen coming out of major animation houses. It is incredibly detailed.

Starting point is 01:19:38 It's a great cockwork. It's a great cockwork. And we're paying, or I say we, I'm using the Royal Wee. I mean, the amount of time I've spent on the writing is just stupid. Like, it's unbelievable how much time I've spent on writing. And it's all, you've written all of it. I've written all of it. You've had editors.

Starting point is 01:19:56 I've written all that. I've had proofreaders. And I've taken, like, it's gotten in areas. It gets so serious, which is so funny. Right? It's dark. We're talking about, like, adoption of orphans and education and, like, tithing to churches and, like, deeply, well, in some cases, I'm hoping what will be like highly developed mythologies and

Starting point is 01:20:17 religious systems and magic systems. And it's like, I have to, and then at the end of the day, I'm like, this is all for something called cockpunch. But you know what? And I have to have a tequila and just be like, that's awesome. That is kind of awesome that I have done so many things in my life and they've all, they've all come together in this defining moment of creating something I'll called cock bunch, but I forgot to mention something very important. And that is part of the reason I did this also is that I've spent the last five to eight years pioneering support of early stage science in psychedelic therapeutics and mental health research for conditions that are conventionally very hard to treat or impossible to treat practically like complex PTSD and

Starting point is 01:21:07 war veterans and victims of sexual abuse like treatment resistant depression and many many other yes different types of trauma and that was initially started because I have a history of both abuse in my childhood and then recurrent major depressive disorder slash treatment resistant depression and I started a foundation called SISA Foundation S-A-S-A-S-E-I-S-E-I-Foundation.comdation.com. to fund these types of initiatives, and it's funded a lot of firsts, a lot of groundbreaking firsts, and people can see them on sysafoundation.org. All of the primary sales from this are going to the foundation. 100% of the primary sales are getting donated straight to the foundation. And that's not because I expect people to do this out of the goodness of their heart or anything like that,

Starting point is 01:21:59 but my driver for this, in part, was to create an unconventional, way to raise funds on a very creative level for Sysay Foundation. And in fact, when I was fundraising for the Johns Hopkins Medicine Psychedelic Research Center, which was the first ever established in the United States, which is a very big deal, ended up having, I think, practically a full page in the New York Times. And it was one of the headlines at the bottom of the New York Times. This was quite a few years ago. So it was a huge groundbreaking event for that entire space. When that happened, I was trying at one point to put together an auction of physical contemporary art to do an auction, which would be something, well, ultimately I then was like, well, maybe I can do with NFTs,

Starting point is 01:22:53 but it's too early, it's too hard, maybe something digital. So I was thinking, well, we could do something like crypto for consciousness, but initially it was intended to be conveyor. conventional contemporary art. And it was just too difficult because A, turns out artists hate doing that generally. Their agents aren't excited because they're not making anything. And it's really difficult. But I spent a lot of time on that. I met with gallerists. I met with artists. I tried to make it work and I just couldn't get it to work. So in fact, that has been a seed in my head for a very long time. How can we use unconventional means? And ideally now with NFTs, block chain or other technologies, I'm agnostic, to raise money for a foundation like this. And what's really exciting to me also, because let's be honest, dealing with, say, graphic stories of abuse and trauma and end-of-life anxiety and people with terminal diagnoses and so on, which is a lot of what I'm dealing with day to day through the foundation, gets really heavy and really dark sometimes and it can be depleting and so I've worried at times about my endurance to continue

Starting point is 01:24:08 to do that work because it can be so overwhelming. With this, I mean cockpunch for fuck's sake, I'm doing something that is completely absurd. It's fun. It's scratching every creative itch that I have and it's giving me tons of energy and raising money for Sysay Foundation and recharging my batteries in a way that I can do the serious work, but not always in a serious way. So that's also a main driver behind the whole thing. That's super cool. This checks a lot of boxes then in like, in kind of your personal journey to you. And okay, so a SciSafe foundation that you just described. So this is some percentage of the minting of the- 100% of the primary sales. 100% of the primary sales. Yeah, 100%.

Starting point is 01:24:55 Like any dollar that flows out of the primary sales. the mint in the primary sales, right? Secondary is a separate thing. I'm going to figure that out because I'm like, you know, it's like heavy six figures into cock punch and I'd like to actually not be totally in the red if it's possible. I'd like to use, you know, secondaries to try to cover a lot of that. But the primary sales, which I'm hoping will be decent, we'll see in today's market conditions, but that is intended to go entirely. 100% to Sisyy Foundation. It's not, well, it is a percentage. It just happens to be 100%. And for people who might be wondering, Sysay Foundation is not a foundation that just holds money and kind of lets it marinate

Starting point is 01:25:45 and deploys the minimum necessary of 5% per year. Like it's generally deploying like 50% or more per year. And what that means is when this money flows in, it's not just going to sit there. It's going to get deployed very quickly. I mean, probably within 12 months, I'd say all of that will get deployed. So, Tim, I know at the time of recording, we are a short time away from the launch of cockpunch, right? Yes. I don't think you're ready to announce dates, at least if you do announce dates between the time we record and the time we want to publish this, Dave and I might talk about it a little bit in the intro. Yeah. But are there any other details, like coming soon sort of thing? I don't know if we're weeks to months away. And then, like, are there any details around the kind of the numbers or the mint price at the early stage or anything you can share?

Starting point is 01:26:34 Yeah, you know, I'll, and I'm sure that my advisor would advise against this. On the mint price side, I will say that this world gets so complex when you start to dig. And the game theory and the economics and the sort of auction mechanics and psychological components, everything, currency prices for God's sake, right? I mean, when we're talking about different types of crypto and macro events, all of these things should inform how you make certain decisions, I think. Creative is number one. However, as things are in this market, you want to do whatever you can feasibly within your control to try to sell out. And I'll try to do that. I'm not overly concerned.

Starting point is 01:27:27 about it. It's not going to stop me from doing what I've told you about with the fiction and everything. But I'll tell you this, the supply will be less than 10,000. I haven't decided how much less, but it'll be less than 10,000. The mint price, because at the end of the day, I want to raise money for the foundation. And I don't expect everyone or anyone to really care about that, but that's one of my main reasons for doing this. So I'm not going to do it at some giveaway price. I also think that a lot of the decisions made by creators in this world are very fear-based, and they let the mob make decisions for them. And I don't think that's actually a great way to create projects or live your life.

Starting point is 01:28:17 And they do, by the way, bleed over. If you start doing that in one area, it's going to bleed over into the rest of your life. So just be aware of letting that in the door. So for Mint Price, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. actually, I've been thinking about somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5, there is a lot of downward pressure for people to just go lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, because they're terrified of not succeeding. But they haven't defined success very clearly for themselves. For me, it's really clear. It's right. Like, I want to raise at least a million bucks because I already have

Starting point is 01:28:47 projects I want to fund through Sysay Foundation that are at least a million bucks. And I don't think at today's prices for if people are looking at it as entertainment and they're like eh could i justify like trading a couple of expensive meals for this or a trip to dizzlingland or two trips to disneyland or going to a broadway show with a few friends or whatever right then i'm like i don't think it's totally insane but i would be curious to hear your thoughts i mean i'm leaning towards between point two five and point five what are your thoughts i think there's two variables to pay attention to. It's kind of hard to talk about a mint price without talking about a total supply. Supply. So if we just use the anchor of 10,000, and you can tinker with that number and you can

Starting point is 01:29:33 address the mint price accordingly. Yeah. 0.25 to 0.5 is expensive, but it does change things that you're donating all the money. Some thought about like NFT drops is that like if you drop the mint at like one eath, like you're taking away room for upside from the token holders, right? Because if it goes from 0.25 up to 5eth as a floor price, then that's a huge gain. If it goes from 1 to 5eath, that's only a 5x. If you drop it at 2.5Eth and it doesn't really have too much room to grow, like some people consider, I intend to make my community wealthy and they give up that upside by lowering them in price. If you were just trying to maximize inflows into this charity, it is very normal organization, then like maybe that doesn't really impact you. But I think

Starting point is 01:30:16 the variable is like how much ROI do you intend on having your purchase? and I'm gathered that you don't really actually want to encourage that behavior. So it's something to consider. Yeah, I would say, and then Ryan, I'd love to your two cents too. So here's what I would say. My intention is not to crater things. Let's be clear, right? I would prefer that people not lose money. But I'm absolutely not stupid enough to guarantee that they're going to make money because that's crazy. And if anybody promises that to you, they are delusional. or a liar or both. So don't believe the hype. And all things being equal, everything you said makes a lot of sense. But I am also a firm believer. For instance, none of my books I've ever gone to paperback or

Starting point is 01:31:07 softcover. People may not realize that. Why is that? Because I feel like I put so much effort and time into creating a quality product. I'm not going to cut the price by a few dollars and have my royalties cut in half so that I have to sell twice as many to make the same amount of money. It makes no sense to me. And in the case of books, if you want something cheaper, just buy a Kindle. Right. But these are certain economic decisions. Or with, say, Todd McFarland, the comic artist I mentioned, who makes some of the most detailed toys on the market. And everyone was selling at $5.99, and he decided to sell $6.99. And they're like, you can't do that. And he said, well, if you're making something that's worth $5.99, and then you charge $6.99, I agree. But he said, if you're making something worth $7.99, and you're you're

Starting point is 01:31:50 you charge $6.99, I think it works. And that's what he was doing. And it did work. So just not to imply I'm selling something that is going to be worth more. I'm not saying that. But I do feel like all things are not equal in a way, which is not saying this is the greatest project of all time, but I'm doing things differently. And I have already, this is not future work. I've already created more than I have seen in any other NFT project, which is, again, not to say it's going to go up and stay up. I can't say that, but it's different. It's different. And it's called cockpunch. So people are going to talk about it. The X factor is like how much like meme lord magic juju do we attribute to cock punch the name in itself. But yeah, Ryan, what are your thoughts?

Starting point is 01:32:46 Well, I think that's magic, right? So what I think that, like, you can't fail to underestimate is the memetic power of this thing. Honestly, we just spent, like, 30 minutes here, just like kind of laughing about the names and all of the, like, part of me is like, Tim, what have you just done to the internet, man? Yep. I think that this could totally blow up. I think, honestly, 0.5 Heath would be on kind of the low side. And I definitely, like, personally, I wouldn't go lower than that. And like, here's the thing. You know, 0.5.Eth is worth a lot less in dollar terms, you know, than it was a year ago. And the other thing I sort of wonder is like, worst case scenario, if you have a high floor price, what if it doesn't completely sell out? Yeah. Like from the get-go.

Starting point is 01:33:25 Is that, I mean, you're going to continue to release the story. Yeah, yeah. The story's going to get released. You know, continue to put the podcast out. Yeah, yeah. It's not like a one-time thing, right? It's not a one-time thing. Now, let me actually get your two cents here, because I've had so many conversations and there's just no consensus, right? Because how could there be? All this stuff is so new. The one argument that I've, paid attention to from one friend, and I'd just love to hear your thoughts, as he said, you know what, if you want to continue to do this beyond this collection, and you want to continue developing this over time, you may want to have the price lower, just so you have

Starting point is 01:34:05 the buffer of feeling very confident that this thing is going to fly out the door, which I feel pretty confident already. I mean, I've done a number of pre-minute pages by this point, and the demand is solid. I'll put it that way. I mean, yeah, the demand is very strong. So I feel good about it, but what are your thoughts on that? I really try, you know, there's a quote. I think it was from Maria Popova, who's one of my favorite people. She runs, it's called the margin alien now, but it was brain pickings. And she's one of the most prolific amazing writers and curators on the planet. And I think I'm attributing this correctly. She said there's something like, I think she said actually pride and guilt are both

Starting point is 01:34:53 terrible reasons to do anything. But I would add fear to that. In most cases, I think fear is a terrible motivating force to ride when you're making decisions. So there's part of me when someone So it's like, ah, like you should like push down, push down, push down, because you really want this one to be guaranteed to sell out and do well because then that will buy you permission to do the next one. How do you think about that? I think you should go with like what would Tim Ferriss do? Because this whole thing is like, is you. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 01:35:24 It's kind of your DNA. Yeah. And if Tim Ferriss is not one to kind of let fear motivate the price, then just don't do that. And you're authentic to yourself. And I mean, look, does Tim Ferriss with everything that you've done, the community and 9,000, million downloads and the books that you've written and the time that you spend on this project, do you have 10,000, like, true fans that are, like, at least, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:45 And then you've got this whole intersection of, like, a group of people that maybe in crypto that don't yet know much about Tim, but, like, are just interested in this really cool experiment. And can you wrestle, like, you know, 8,000, 10,000 people to spend 0.5 eth on that to a good cause? Yeah. I don't know. I'm pretty bullish on it, but, like, you know, David is more the NFT collector among

Starting point is 01:36:06 the two of us. So what do you think, David? I think to consider the price is certainly important. I think it's more worth your effort, Tim, to consider how to optimize ensuring that the people that are able to buy these NFTs are the people that you want to own them. That's a good take. The Tim Ferriss NFT is going to get gamed by bots and like hoarders and people who are going to suck value out of your project to whatever degree that you can identify your fans that are just as bullish on cockpunch as you are and make sure that they are able to buy the NFT, that I think is a better use of your time. And I think the price is going to, I think you can kind of sell the thing for anything, honestly. Can I hop in for a second just to talk about that?

Starting point is 01:36:52 Sure. So I've spent at least dozens of hours thinking about exactly what you just said. So we're on the same page. How can I ensure that the people I want to own these, own these? The first is by not promising any utility or road map in a sense. And that's a dog whistle. What is a dog whistle? I know what a physical dog whistle. What does that mean? Yeah, it's like you say a thing, but it's like a wink, wink, I'm actually going to do it kind of thing. Like, I'm going to say one thing. Yeah, no, I can assure you. With me, it's not. This is this. I'm sure there are going to be some surprises, but that does not mean that I'm going to be, you know, as I put it on the proof podcast, like twice year taking people to NBA games and given unenthusiastic handjobs under

Starting point is 01:37:37 the bleachers. Like, I'm not going to be... Let me say it this way. You didn't dissuade anyone who's trying to game your drop by saying that. You made me more excited about it during this episode by just talking about it. Now, game the drop in what sense? And then I'll come back to what I was going to say. Like flipping them, buying and flipping them just because it's Tim Ferriss's NFT and I don't really care about the cock punch universe. Yeah. there will also be a revealed delay just to throw that in there. Okay, that's a start. But, which I think is going to be entertaining. And I think it'll be actually very exciting to watch. But the, this murk on your face tells me all I need to know. Yeah. So, so here's what I'd say. How do I try to get people to buy this who I would like to buy this?

Starting point is 01:38:18 Or like, like, if they're going to buy it, that I'm going to like actually would be okay, like, sitting at a dinner table with them instead of wanting to like drop kick them in the face. that one is I say don't buy this as an investment. Like I'm in this, not because I want to make a ton of money. To be honest, there are easier ways for me to make money. This is so labor intensive. I'm in this because I want to entertain myself. And that's fucking it. I want the energy also, the gift of energy,

Starting point is 01:38:54 and the drafting of energy, the absorption of energy off of this, so that I can apply it to all sorts of things, right? Namely, the foundation work just to offset how intense that can be. But it's entertainment, right? So I want people who are somewhat aligned with that. And that's why I keep bringing up the analogy. Like, are you willing to trade like a handful of dinners for this, given the price, right? And I'm running off of current pricing.

Starting point is 01:39:19 It could have changed, right? But if we're talking about 0.5 eth, right, it's like, whatever, 500, 600 bucks, something like that, at least as we're talking right now, I think, obviously moves around a lot. So I keep using these entertainment analogies very, very deliberately. The other thing I say, and this is going to be in the FAQ on the mint page, is like, if you're a dick, I'm going to block you. Like, I'm going to block you from every interesting thing that I can block you from. So just because it's become a norm that on the internet, you can act in a way that would get you slapped in the real world, those rules are different here.

Starting point is 01:39:56 Those you will get cock blocked. And not only blocked from this, but if I do anything in the future, if I can conceivably block you, I will block you. And I really want there to be a community, which to be clear doesn't mean I don't want feedback. I love feedback and I love constructive criticism. But like, if it's delivered in a way that you would deliver to me in person or like at a dinner, right? Not in a way that has become the norm online, which is just being a total dick.

Starting point is 01:40:28 That's not going to be okay. So that's another way for trying to filter those people out. And I have thought methodically of how I can, to the extent possible, lose those folks who are going to be just a drain on not just me, but honestly on the whole community where people are going to be like, oh, this guy again. I want to avoid that. You basically want people who are going to hold long term then, Tim, right? That's a big piece. You don't want the flipping as much. Yeah, I would love long-term holders. I mean, there are going to be people who flip. I get it. You know, another way of, I've thought about it, and I haven't figured this out yet, but, you know, do I limit the number of NFTs per wallet? I almost certainly will, but like, what is the limit? Is it three? Is it two? Is it one? I mean, you sort of discourage flipping as soon as you decrease that number, especially with a reveal.

Starting point is 01:41:16 Second, I will also still gameable, however. Yeah, gameable, for sure. Gameable. The other way that you can discourage that is what I'm doing right now, which is the communities that I have reached out to to offer, say, pre-ment pages where they can apply for allow list are all people I know. Every case has been somebody I know whose judgment I trust, who has cultivated, I think, communities where they're less likely to be problematic. So I've also been very deliberate about that, which might be the best way to sort of achieve the objective. But I'm thinking a lot about this, a lot about this. Because, like, for instance, what I wish I could do on Twitter is block somebody so that no one could see them in the comments on any posts.

Starting point is 01:42:02 That would be a great feature because it's high consequence, right? Like, if you have no impulse control, you better cultivate it because if you're a dick, you can get vanished. And, I mean, you can block someone and they wouldn't see your tweets or whatever like that. but I have found that on my blog, for instance, after a thousand blog posts or whatever, that having it in the comment rules like, hey, we're going to be cool here, like the Fonz. If you're not cool, you're gone. And the community gets it real quick. They get it real quick.

Starting point is 01:42:30 And they also start to self-police, right, which is important. So by like laying out the rules, I mean, let's be honest. The people who are being idiots online are being idiots because they think it's going to get them some cheap applause for the seats where they'll get a couple of favorites and somebody would be like, yeah, out of boy, yeah, you tell them. And if all of a sudden, for every one of those, they get 20 people being like, dude, you're a dick, by the way. Like, you know, why don't you eat some more spaghettios and yell up from the basement to your mom to get some more? You know, like, they're going to get, enforcement. So that's going to be good. Anyway, I don't know if any of this is making sense.

Starting point is 01:43:08 Look, I do think that Founders DNA contributes to this. Like, there's clearly a lot of NFD projects that are trying to like pump the price of their project like you know get celebrities to kind of use it and promise all sorts of utility promise entire future worlds and so you know i think you'll get some natural effects from kind of not doing some of those things i guess you know what tim this kind of reminds me of as we sort of zoom out a little bit is just what i love about how you've described this project is you are experimenting with telling a story using a new medium yeah and i think that's really powerful, right? So like back in the day of Tolkien, right, writing books. That was the way you sort of explored that. And then we had like different movies, of course, you could explore

Starting point is 01:43:50 telling a story that way. I remember when I was young, like many listeners, very into video games. And I remember really getting into the lore of Warcraft. Yeah. Right. And it wasn't just a video game. Like you could read about Azaroth and the orcs and like the dark portal and there were different characters that would come down. And for me, it was just like a more immersive way. to use my imagination to get inside of a world using this new form, which is like a video game. And now you're starting to bring that to NFTs in a new creative way that I don't think I've seen, like focusing on the story itself and telling that story through a digital collectible that is on a blockchain. I think that's what's most exciting about this project to me.

Starting point is 01:44:34 Yeah. I mean, you're singing to the choir for me. You're preaching to the choir, I guess, is the proper way to put it. I think I'm a writer. Am I supposed to use words correctly? Just when you write. I mean, I'm excited about it. I could not be more excited. And I will say, folks, if you have not read token stuff, go back and read it and you're

Starting point is 01:44:53 going to think to yourself, oh, my God, all these things that we take for granted now, different types of elves and orcs and so, like these wizard archetypes, my goodness, this guy came up with a lot and codified a lot that we just take for granted now. It's ubiquitous. It's the water fantasy that we all swim in. If we engage with fantasy, it's incredible. There are some New York Times pieces also on his notebooks, and there's a separate New York Times piece on his language invention.

Starting point is 01:45:24 And I recommend everybody take a look at those to get an idea of just how insanely obsessive and detailed he was with this. I also wrote a lot of his books during wartime, by the way. So all the more impressive. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited. There are a lot of new elements. I have played in a handful of sandboxes now and been able to play well, right, in books and then

Starting point is 01:45:47 in podcasts and then in producing audiobooks. A lot of people don't realize that. Like I experimented with producing audiobooks for a while and did, I don't know, 10 or 15, some of which have done super, super, super well, like The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, which I recommend everybody. Excellent book. So this is a new sport for me. where I can see like, okay, what can I do here? What can I do here? And, you know, which tools do I want to pull off the rack and play with here? And I have not had this much energy and I've not had this much fun for, I don't know, five, six, seven years with any major project. So I feel like that's a good sign. I think listeners should feel like they've been sufficiently cockpunched by the

Starting point is 01:46:33 end of this conversation. Okay, so I have, tell us, just summarize the release plan really, really quick and kind of next steps if people are interested in seeing what's coming next. Tell us about that. And then I have one more question for you before we close it out. Yeah, next step is simple. It's emergent. And therefore, I would suggest people follow at Cockpunch on Twitter. I would suggest they also follow at T-Farris, my main account, which has 1.8 or 1.9

Starting point is 01:47:02 million followers right now. So follow at T-F-F-E-R-I-S. So at Cockpunch on Twitter, at T-Farris. then cockpunch.com will also have quite a bit. That was awesome, Tim. All right. Thank you. How much did cockpunch.com cost you? You know, I can't kiss and tell on that one, but the fact that I spent so much time and had so many people involved in getting that is yet another comical absurdity related to this project. Last question for you, because I can resist. You mentioned it a little bit earlier.

Starting point is 01:47:35 I think a lot of people listening now when this episode comes up, they will have all. also been in the place with you where they have been, like, hit by FDX and some of the damage that SPF and others caused. Yeah. Is there anything you could say about that? I mean, you could divulge whatever you'd like about that, about, like, kind of, I don't know, but hopefully, I guess my ask you, do you have any advice for people listening who've just been hit hard by that? Because it sounds like you found yourself in a similar position. Just describe that for us. Yeah, it's been brutal. And I know people who are in really bad positions right now. because of all of this and we're super heavily weighted in crypto. I was very heavily weighted in

Starting point is 01:48:15 crypto. I mean, I still am, but that percentage is gone down a lot, right? I mean, a lot of folks are down 70, 80 plus percent, depending on what they're looking at. And I think it's, I don't think, I know that it's scary. I mean, I remember in 2008 when I just bought my first house and this is less than a year or might have been late 2007. I bought my first house shortly after the book, which by the way, four-hour work week, I mean, I got a $75,000 advance paid over like 17 installments. So it was not much. Then that was paid out over a long time, like a year plus, I want to say, and bought my first house, which was a stretch and then put a bunch of money into stock. because I was told that's what I should do.

Starting point is 01:49:12 And then 2008, right, subprime mortgage crisis, financial implosion, everything just craters. And I was on, I made a big mistake tactically. I was on an adjustable rate mortgage. And that turned into a real problem. And it was terrifying. It was really terrifying for me. And what helped me then and what still helps me and what might help some people listening is to do an exercise that is always in my hip pocket for one I need it called fear setting. And I actually gave a TED talk on this for people who want that type of explanation.

Starting point is 01:49:56 They can find it. It's got, I think, 10 million plus views. And fear setting is this process by which, and I think if you just go to Tim. blog slash TED actually, tim dot blog slash TED. You find the TED Talk and then you also find the text. And the text, I believe, originated. The first time I put it down on paper was four hour work week. I've made some slight tweaks to it, but the general process, I'll just tell people how to do it, is you in one column, take a piece of paper and you break it into a handful of columns. On the left-hand side, you make a long list of all of the things that could go wrong, all of the worst things that could

Starting point is 01:50:38 happen. And write them down in detail, if possible. Then in the second column, and there are a few different versions of this, but the second column, you write down what you could do, if anything, to decrease the likelihood of each of those things happening. Okay. So get a big piece of paper for this or multiple pages or you could do it digitally. I like to do it by hand because I'm an old bastard. Then in the third column, you write down what you could do to minimize the damage or recover if these things happen at all. Like, what could they be? Right. So if, if your savings are down and you're worried about getting laid off because your company is laying people off or maybe it could lay people off, what could you do? Right. Like,

Starting point is 01:51:29 what can you do to minimize the likelihood of that? happening, it's like go to your boss, ask if you could do an early performance review, or get proactive about improving and demonstrating performance, making yourself indispensable, right? Learning how to use different tools for sort of optimizing your workflow and output. Maybe you're not even communicating what you're doing well to your boss, right? I mean, there are things you could do to minimize the likelihood of getting laid off, just as an example. I'm making this off the cuff. And then if you did get laid off, what could you do? Well, maybe there are, and I'm not saying these are desirable, right? These are lesser options, not ideal

Starting point is 01:52:08 options, but there are things you could do to minimize the damage. You could get a job at Starbucks, right? You could download Uber on your app and start driving on Uber or doing something else in the gig economy. You could, let's just say you're a designer hypothetically, right? You could throw yourself up on any number of sites that allow you to do per project projects kind of on demand, you could start your own business. I happen to think that recessions are some of the best times to start business because there's a lot of talent out there that is available at bargain basement prices. And all of my best investments, by the way, were made between 2008 and 2010. Dotcom Depression. Practically all of the best ones were made during that period of time. What else could you do? You could ask friends or family to give you a loan,

Starting point is 01:52:59 I know this is going to sound very unappetizing, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility for a lot of people. Like you could do that if it came down to it, so on and so forth, right? And when you put all of this on paper, what it does at the very least is it allows you to downregulate your nervous system so that you're more emotionally stable and you can make decisions from a clear place. where you're not constantly inside the snow globe that's been shaken up being bounced here and fro, here and fro, to and fro, here and there, by every bit of craziness that you come across while

Starting point is 01:53:43 you're doom scrolling on Twitter. I would say stop that too, by the way. Don't doom scrolling Twitter. Just stop looking for bad news on Twitter would be one. I never look at my feed. I only look at replies and stuff. Basically, never look at my feed. So, and a corollary, a compliment to the fear setting exercise would be go on a low information diet immediately. A selective ignorance, low information diet. I wrote a bunch about it in the four-hour workweek. I still follow this. I don't have any social apps downloaded on my phone. I used to, and I realized I'm outgunned. Their PhDs and data scientists and algorithms are going to defeat my self-control every day. so they're not on my phone. I can still access them, but I have to go through the trouble of going to

Starting point is 01:54:29 a browser or getting them on my laptop and using them. So those would be a few things that come to mind. And if people want bonus points, they could do some reading of Stoic philosophy. Stoic philosophy is very good for times like this. I think it builds incredible resilience and just makes you, it gives you a higher threshold of stress tolerance in volatile times. So you can do that any number of ways, the moral letters to Lucilius by Seneca the Younger. The Penguin Classics version is letters from a Stoic, I believe, by Seneca the Younger, by Seneca more typically. I put out free PDFs, this is a while back called the Tao of Seneca. You can find these on Timot blog, the Tau of Seneca. You can download these, I think, incredibly well put together PDFs with

Starting point is 01:55:17 original illustrations and calligraphy and incredible maxims. People can find that for free. those are a few things that come to mind. I mean, this is scary. It's really scary. And especially if you're in crypto, where things are more volatile, it's a very manic depressive community, in my experience, right? Like the mania and the fear and depression is so extreme. It gets amplified to the ends of the polls. And it can make, I think, people less resilient. When you're exposed to that day and day out. So I would also say to the extent possible, spend time with friends or find friends to spend time with or follow people online if you're going to follow people online who exhibit a calm, measured demeanor. That would be another one who aren't panicking

Starting point is 01:56:15 constantly online. There's someone who comes to mind who's a friend and I don't spend a lot of time digesting his Twitter account, but like Sam Harris. I think would probably be a good exemplar of that. And he walks the talk in real life. I mean, he is what you would hope him to be. So those are a few pieces of advice that come to mind. No one can control the macro. Nobody does.

Starting point is 01:56:39 And you can't predict what the Fed's going to do. You can't predict what Putin's going to do. You can't predict what anyone is going to do. You can only control or try to cultivate the ability to respond with a little gap so that you can consider your response as opposed to being hyper-reactive. And I would try to spend time on that

Starting point is 01:57:09 because that's the equivalent of the seatbelt or the airbag in the car crash is having that awareness that you've cultivated so that you are not subject to being tossed by the winds of news cycles and so on, because things could get a lot worse. I don't want to predict that. I'm not necessarily predicting that, but things could get a lot worse. I've been through, this is one of the benefits of maybe being in my mid-40s, is I've been through quite a few of these. I've been through 99, 2000, where I got laid off, and that's when I started my first real company,

Starting point is 01:57:47 which turned out great. And I used my severance and at the time, healthcare in California, Cobra, to cover me for enough time for me to really get motivated and try to get some cash in the door, which I did, enough to at least pay for rent and so on. So I've been through that. I've been through 2008 and I've been through various wars and so on.

Starting point is 01:58:11 And then coming through this, and the good news is once you go through a few of these, you do get a little calmer. and I know this is probably a day late, a dollar short in terms of advice, but I do not place investments or bets or certainly not gambles with money that I cannot afford to lose. Right. And I've made mistakes with this, just to be clear. Early on, I did make mistakes. I was like, fuck, there goes my entire bankroll. Now what? So I've learned over time. But the way that I'm talking about this project, maybe kind of a Debbie Downer to end, on this. But the way I'm talking about this project, and I'm saying, like, hey, guys, view it as entertainment, could go to zero. This is exactly the conversation that I have with friends if I'm an advisor to an early stage startup and I go to them to see if they want to invest. If they ask me,

Starting point is 01:59:02 like, what do you think this has a potential to do? Like 10x, 100x,000x,000x, because some of these startups, 1,000x, I mean, it's crazy, but they do. And most of them go to zero. I'll give my answer, whatever my answer is. And then I'll say, there is a chance, as you know, very good chance. This goes to zero. There are a million ways this could go to zero. And you should not put anything in that you are not perfectly on some level happy to lose because you know this is completely asymmetrical.

Starting point is 01:59:33 It's binary. It's zero or one and one being, hopefully some multiple, but not always. And, you know, I've been involved with startups where I have advised and put in work for seven, eight years and end up with zero. Or I end up with a check for like $1,200. That's just kind of part of the world that I've become accustomed to operating in. So I'm very accustomed now to volatility and playing any of these, not playing, but being involved with any of these markets with that in mind. So I always look at my maximum downside potential and I only use what I'm comfortable losing. But I realize that for a lot of folks, they will not find that useful for the events

Starting point is 02:00:20 that have just transpired. But it is a very, very good guideline for any of this stuff moving forward. And there will be more bull markets. There are going to be more bull markets. And there are definitely going to be more bare markets. And if you're in it for the long game, and I encourage everyone to be in it for the long game. You benefit from, and I have benefited from over time, learning from my mistakes and developing a philosophical safety net by cultivating certain beliefs and practices through things like stoicism and fear setting, which is adapted directly from stoicism, by the way. And cognitive behavioral therapy was also based largely on Stoke philosophy, just as a side note for folks.

Starting point is 02:01:10 And it's hard, man. It is. From a political level, from a geopolitical level, from a economic perspective, things seem really scary. Choose your sources of information very carefully. And titrate it down to the bare minimum and focus on, in my opinion,

Starting point is 02:01:33 focus on creating, not consuming. And that might sound strange, coming from somebody who's launching this project shortly, but focus on creating. I mean, part of my hope is that people who engage with this will actually engage with creating, maybe related to this world, maybe not. But things at some point will hit that rebound and they will, I expect that there will be more bull markets. It would be a first in history if that weren't the case. But it could take a long time. It could take, it could take a while, right? So also,

Starting point is 02:02:07 don't believe people on crypto Twitter who are like, look at this chart. It's coming back next week. It's coming back next week. Don't make any of your- Oh, it's every single chart and it's got a green line that points up. Yeah. Do not base your long-term financial decisions on any of that. Bear markets can last a while, right? I mean, it could be five, six, seven years, maybe longer. I mean, it could be that long. It might not be. But I would say, be optimistic when you're making any kind of spending money don't spend money you can't afford to lose or if you're placing it anywhere and I will say also for creativity for entrepreneurship everything that I've done everything that I've seen all the best stuff comes out of bare markets same here and I think that's been the story of crypto and Tim I think we're kind of concluding with you know what people love about you so much and you're a conversation is when you asked him for advice, he comes back with like mental models and tools and books and references and TED talks and things you can go download because he's worked through

Starting point is 02:03:18 many of these issues. And we certainly appreciate that about you. Fear setting, low information diet, letters from a stoic. We could be in this bear market for a while in crypto. And these are some of the mental tools you need to prepare yourself. Tim, it's been a pleasure man. It's really cool to meet you in person. You're like, you know, you're going to have to show us how do you get to a billion podcast downloads. We just hit 30 million, I think, last week. Congratulations. We got a long road to get to a billion, my friend. But yeah, teach us what you know. I've been doing it since 2014. So what I would say, here's my advice on the podcast. This will apply to anyone. Choose something you can sustain. So create something that is sort of wide enough and flexible enough that you can

Starting point is 02:04:07 keep it interesting for yourself so you have the energy to continue. Ideally, something that feeds you. Otherwise, you're just not going to have the endurance. And that's why I designed my podcast and the way I designed it and continue to experiment with different formats. And that is how I've approached my books. That is also how I'm approaching Cockpott. Is how do I set the parameters and conditions and expectations in the beginning such that I can continue to create. And it's true for the podcast. I think it's true for your podcast. I think it's true for all podcasts. And that's why when people are like, I've never done a podcast, I'm going to try to out this American life, this American life. And I'm like, ooh, ooh, that's a risky one. That's a risky one. And then I talked to them two months later.

Starting point is 02:05:00 I'm like, how the podcast's going? They're like, yeah, I did two episodes and there's so much fucking worry. I quit. I'm like, yeah, could have seen that coming. That's what we've learned, too, is you have to make it a passion. And that's certainly true. I think a sage advice to end with for you and I, David, is, you know, getting energy. The last two weeks, I will say, Tim, have been kind of energy draining in a lot of ways in crypto, and even the podcast game. But yeah, all right, man, we appreciate it. Cockpunch coming soon. I love that we open serious, and then we had cockpunch in the middle, and then we kind of ended serious. Perfect way to bookend to this episode.

Starting point is 02:05:29 It's great to be with you. at cockpunch, cockpunch.com. We've got some action items for you, Bankless Nation, as we always do. That's cockpung.com. If you want to check out what Tim is brewing, follow at Cockpunch on Twitter. Also, you could check out the foundation that he was mentioning. We've got a link. He's just loving that I'm saying cockpunch.

Starting point is 02:05:47 Fear setting, too. We'll include a link that Tim mentioned to the TED Talk, letters from a stoic, all of these resources in the show notes. Of course, Tim, Tim, you're going to like this. We do risk and disclaimers at the end of every episode. Hopefully you pay attention, bankless listener. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - 146 - Tim Ferriss on NFTs and 'Cockpunch'

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