The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 590: Nat Eliason - Winning & Losing Millions, Moonwalking with Einstein, Creating Memory Dividends, Making Our Days More Memorable, and Writing Captivating Stories (Crypto Confidential)

Episode Date: July 7, 2024

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3XxHi7p Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com  This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent. Notes: Nat Eliason studied philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. Since he started publishing his writing in 2013, his work has been read by millions of people and spun out multiple businesses ranging from a marketing agency to a cafe. He's the author of Crytpo Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance. How to make our days more memorable? Throw parties with 3-4 different phases. When taking your loved one out on a date, have 3 different parts. Implement homework for life. Write down the stories of each day. This helps you remember them more. Do Hard Things – Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. "Build up your identity of being a capable person." "Money corrupts quickly." It's never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying "Oh it'll be a better time later," you're probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life. Moonwalking with Einstein -- Memory competitions. Die with Zero -- Create memory dividends (Bill Perkins). Be in the moment. Homework for Life (Matthew Dicks). Nat's birthday this year was the first time he ever felt sad (on a birthday)... Why? "It feels like it's going by quicker than it ever has." Create time with texture? "Mine workers have time with texture. I'm not sure that's memorable or desirable." Crypto Confidential is the roller coaster story of getting rich, going broke, scamming, and getting scammed. It's a narrative of Nat's personal journey through the world of crypto, but it's also a revealing look at exactly how the crypto sausage gets made—and how we can all be more educated participants during the next inevitable bull run. Money can buy happiness. So long as you spend it on upgrading and expanding the things that make you happy, instead of using it to play status games or on fleeting experiences.

The goal is to lower the bar on what makes a good memorable experience. The happiest life might also be one of the least memorable ones. And you're a great writer. You say like, hey, I'm going to write Crypto Confidential. Can you share more Nat about the importance of manufacturing hardship for yourself? A lot of people are familiar with this idea of learned helplessness. Crypto Competential is getting so much amazing press. It's really about the human experience of fully diving into a financial mania and kind of losing yourself in it.

I opened up my coin base was like $80,000. It was this holy shit, but I'm like, where did this come from? This is insane. Wow, what happened next? Sorry, I should see a sec. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Text Hawk. 6-6-866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off. Right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader.

Nat Eliasson. studied philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. Since he started publishing his writing in 2013, his work has been read by millions of people and spun out multiple businesses ranging from a marketing agency to a cafe. He's the author of Crypto Confidential, Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance. During our conversation, we discuss. We actually started this one going pretty deep into some life. philosophy stuff and it's not what I expected. Nat shares how we can make our days more memorable.

Really good. Then we talked about why we need to do more hard things and he shares stories of how his parents helped them develop resilience at a really young age. And then we closed the conversation talking about the highs and lows of his experience in crypto, why he wrote a book about it, and the movie producers who are already talking with him about optioning it because it is so entertaining. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Nat Eliasson. All right, Nat, it is awesome to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, my man. Thank you. It's awesome to be here.

So March 5th, 2024, you published an essay saying this year on your birthday was the first year you've ever felt sad on your birthday. Why is that? It was kind of an odd feeling. When I turned 30, I didn't feel it at all. It just felt normal. But 31 felt different. And I know anybody older listening to this is going to think that's absurd. And I realize it's absurd.

But it was the first year where I'd actually felt like, oh, things are actually going by really quickly. And I'm not remembering what happened in the year as well anymore. And it really felt like time had just completely flown by it. Like my last birthday had just happened. And I'd never really had that experience that acutely before. And I think that can come from a few things. One, having young kids definitely accelerates things.

But I think it's also just settling into no longer being in this manic exploratory. career phase that I've been in for the last nine years before it and really feeling like I have my thing, this is my thing, I have my daily routine, I like my daily routine. And the days are definitely happier, but because they're more routine, they tend to blend together more. And so it's this really challenging balance between having a consistent schedule and routine that makes you happy is sort of the ideal life, because then you're not. constantly chasing novelty and new things to excite you and keep you interested.

You're just happy, satisfied day to day. But those days tend to blend together. So when you look back, you might not have that many big signposts for the year that let you say, oh, you know, all these great big things happened, all these places I went, all these goals and achievements that I hit. I basically just worked on a book for a year. And I didn't even get to publish it during that year. And so it's, I've thought about this question a lot, right?

that the happiest life might also be one of the least memorable ones. And that's a really challenging balance between wanting to feel accomplished and having all these signposts and being comfortable living in the moment and being satisfied with that. Interesting that you'd say the happiest life could be the least memorable. Do you really mean that? Yes, I do. In the sense that imagine somebody who doesn't have to worry about income can wake up and do creative projects and then play with their kids and then have

wine and dinner with their friends, go on walks, hikes, and stay in a relatively confined area. That's probably a really happy life. All of the stressors aren't there. They're not constantly flying around on planes to try to go do new things all the time. Their day to day is probably fantastic. But if you asked them, what did you do four days ago or what did you do eight days ago or 13 days ago? If they looked at their Google calendar, they would say, I don't know, I probably did this. And it was great. But I have a hard time sussing out what happened on each of those individual days. And maybe that's okay. How much of that is your life as of today? Most of it.

I'd actually say that my life right now is, it's not in that ideal routine that I really like just because I'm gearing up for book launch. And so I'm doing a lot more promotion work. I'm kind of back in my sales and marketing mode, which I'm good at, but I don't like it as much as my writing monk mode. And so there's there's this bit of excitement to get back to that routine too, because I really do just. enjoy waking up, going to a coffee shop, getting a few hours of writing done, doing shallow work in the afternoon, and having that day-to-day consistency. Have you been made aware of Scott Belski's idea that in order to make life more memorable, we need to add texture to time? And he used an example that in his mind, and I agree with him, it's more enjoyable to go on a vacation

where you hike with friends, then one where you lay on a beach. And this idea of adding texture to time, and I'll actually read some of my notes from this. I don't expect us to go here, but I just pulled it up. You're only able to recollect experiences with enough friction to add texture to time as it passes.

Time spent doing the unexpected and or being challenged is time with texture. Ultimately, in our dying breath, the more experiences in our lives with texture, the more of our lives we will actually remember and the longer we will feel we have lived. What do you think of that now? I know you're really thoughtful guy. You're an amazing writer.

When you hear this idea of texture with time and that you need a challenge to make it more memorable than just laying on a beach, what does that make you think of? I suppose it depends on what we mean by texture. If texture means challenge, then I don't necessarily agree because. working in the minds all day would be very challenging, but it wouldn't be very memorable. The more compelling explanation I've heard that I really like is from this book, Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Feuer, where he becomes a competitive memorizer. He goes to interview these people who do memory competitions. He ends up joining them and becoming a competitive memory master himself and then wins the

national championship in the span of a year. It's this really great story. And there's actually a small part of the book where he's talking to one of these memory experts who explains how he throws parties. And he says that when he throws parties, he makes sure that every party has three or four distinct phases in different locations with different themes, with different drinks, with different activities. Because the more you break up the event into the these discrete novel parts, the more memorable the whole event will be. And another version of this I've heard, I haven't read this in a very long time, but Mark Manson's models book about like how to talk to women, he talks about how to

structure a perfect first date. And he says that the best first date is one with three different parts, something casual and light and then maybe something a little more involved, like a full meal. So you might meet for drinks one place, go get a meal somewhere else, and then do an activity after that. Because you have three distinct, you basically have three dates in one. All three of them are going to be memorable for different reasons. And you get to see the person in different settings as well. So breaking up an event into sub-events ends up making it more memorable.

And I think that's really compelling. And I think that feeds into some of this feeling around routine versus memorability. because if you have a trip where you're in a new country every week, that's going to be a ton of novelty. And you'll be able to look back on your year and say, oh, yeah, this week we were in Germany and this week we were in Austria and this week we were in Australia. And that's going to be crazy memorable, even if you weren't engaging with a ton of friction or texture along the way. But if you're just at home the whole year, that's going to be each part of it's going to be a lot less distinctly memorable. So is the goal then to make, to create more, as Bill Perkins might say, which you did on this podcast, to create more memory dividends, which these are memories that you actually remember, you look back on fondly, you smile. When I think of my memory dividends, they're usually when I'm surrounded by people that I love and that love me and we're doing something together, maybe hiking, maybe not.

Is that what you're trying to create in your life? Because routine and doing this. same thing and being the same place with the exact same people every day probably doesn't create as many memory dividends as new locations, maybe even people doing different types of things. Really thinking out loud here, Nat, so I appreciate you riffing with me on this because I think it's super interesting. I go back and forth on it because on the one hand, and I love Die with Zero. It's one of my favorite money books. It actually changed some of my thinking around money.

It's wonderful. And I really love that idea of memory dividends because reminiscing is nice. Looking back on your life and the things that have happened and the things that you did is wonderful. And there's a completely counter idea, which I maybe first heard of this from Naval, but he was saying that you shouldn't take pictures of anything. Because if you're taking pictures, that's pulling you out. of the experience and out of the moment. And if in the future you were looking back on pictures of past events, you were no longer living in that moment. And a lot of the deepest satisfaction and sustained happiness, I think, does come from just full present state awareness, being fully

in the moment, not having your mind off somewhere else. And so if you are living semi out of the moment to create things so that your future self can also live out of the moment. That might be a mistake too. So I can see that argument, but emotionally, I don't agree with it because I like reminister. I like, it's nice. And so where I come down on more is I feel like the goal is to lower the bar on what makes a good memorable experience. And this might be similar to thinking about how wrecked our dopamine has been by TikTok and social media, where it's really hard to sit down and enjoy a slow book. But you can retrain that.

You can read slower books and you'll get used to it. You'll start to enjoy it and you'll get value from it. And you might be able to do that with your memories too, where you don't need to go to a new country or do anything crazy to have a really wonderful memory for the future, a great dinner with friends that you grab a couple of pictures of would be a sufficiently rich experience to have a wonderful memory of later. And so maybe by finding simpler ways to kind of hit that memorable experience threshold,

you make it even easier to build that memory bank for the future too. Another thing I learned from a conversation on this podcast came from Matthew Dix. You may have read Storyworthy, great storyteller. He's won all these storytelling competitions. but one of his TED talks focuses on homework for life. And what homework for life is is essentially at the end of each day, you take five minutes or so and you jot down the highlights or even just the moments of the day.

And this actually helps slow down time because you remember more of your days. Because if you don't write them down, it's much easier to forget what actually happened, even if it was mundane or something funny, one of your kids said or whatever, but taking five to ten minutes, at the end of the day doing your homework for life. And I started doing it after we, I recorded with them a few years ago.

And it really does because I go back and read through old homework for life entries. I'm like, oh my gosh, if I wouldn't have written that down, I probably would not have remembered it. And now I have all of this, this like giant bank of memories that I'd written down because I committed to doing homework for life. So that is another way, I think, to slow down. As you said, you got sad because you realized how fast time. was going. That homework for life is another way, I think, to slow it down a bit and to remember

more of the things that happen day to day, regardless of travel or any texture with that time. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I do feel like as much as the phones can be a curse sometimes, they are a blessing for some of that, because even if you don't get around to doing that homework, you do have all the random little photos you take. And those can often be a really good way of resurfacing those moments from the past at least. You know, you're maybe not reviewing them at the end of the day or you're not doing this active process of remembering it. But literally one of my favorite things for my wife and I to do at the end of the day is

just see what featured photos or little stories come up in Apple photos on our phone. Yeah. And we'll often watch them together before we go to sleep because it'll pick some, you know, random thing from six months ago or a year and a half ago, usually with our kids. and it's always a little thing, but then we see the photo and we remember it and we can go, oh, yeah, that day was really fun or this thing happened. And that's a really, really nice way to reflect if you don't do this active process. But I like the active process too. Well, the pictures, that's why that element, I love a lot of what Naval has to say. That part of it,

I think taking pictures, I read this post from James Clear years ago, one of his friends, unfortunately, died, very young age. And at the end of this post about him, James had said, you know, take the pictures. Take the pictures with them. You just never know. And that left an imprint on me, like, if I'm with people I love, like, yeah, let's, let's commemorate the time, the day, the dinner, whatever the thing is, take the picture. I think it does create that those memories to look back on fondly and smile and maybe laugh

with your friends. Totally, totally. Yeah, I'm not in the anti-picture camp, though I do find it an interesting. idea to entertain. I read something you wrote about doing hard things and I'm a believer in doing hard things as well to create evidence for myself that I can so that when I encounter adversity in the future, which is one of the inevitabilities of life is that something is going to pop up on a regular basis and I'm going to have to deal with it.

But you wrote, our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see. yourself to be. Can you share more not about the importance of manufacturing hardship for yourself, doing hard things to prepare yourself to be able to better handle it in the future? Yeah, I think a lot of people are familiar with this idea of learned helplessness, right? And that topic has been tossed around a lot where in the classic study on this is with the dogs in the it's awful study, but they had some dogs in a crate or in a pen, and they electrocuted them, and they had them confined so they couldn't escape. And they did that a bunch, and then they

removed the barriers, but they kept shocking the dogs, and they still didn't leave because they had learned that they couldn't. And a lot of us fall into various forms of that trap. And I think unfortunately, there's a, there's a great business or tons of great business to be built around thinking that you need really easy solutions to your problems, right? You'll, you'll solve this problem in your life if you buy this book or download this app or take this course or buy this product. And that's kind of the default way we often try to solve our problems. But a lot of these problems often have relatively simple solutions that are challenging to do. but are not inherently extremely complex.

But we don't want to do the hard thing, whether that's getting up in writing every day, whether that's eating less during the day, going for that run, doing these relatively simple but challenging things to do. And so we look for these easier solutions to our problems, the pills and apps and whatnot. And really the only way to,

consistently be able to solve those challenging problems is if you're willing to do those hard things. And most people aren't willing to do them because they've never had to. And they've never chosen to push themselves to do them. I have a much older article called increasing the difficulty on life where basically the argument is that most of us, if you're listening to this podcast right now, right? Or if you're living in America and, you know, you're above like median income, your life is

by historical accounts incredibly easy and by international accounts incredibly easy, right? You have to respond to emails. You have to drive to work. None of these are, you know, surviving in the minds, right? Or foraging for your food or, you know, escaping some brutal dictatorship. And you're actually capable of probably way much more. challenge than you think you are, but you have to prove it to yourself because nobody else is going to prove it to you for you. And the sooner you do that, the sooner you kind of unlock all this

other potential in your life. And the premise of that article was this kind of question of like, why are we making kids learn calculus in high school? They're never going to learn calculus again for the rest of their lives. And my point was that the main reason you make a high school or learn calculus is to see if they can do it and to see if they can push themselves to do it. Because if they can, then they can probably push themselves to do other things. And they know that they have learned this

challenging thing. And that is valuable in and of itself, right? I think that cold plunges get a bad rep because it's become such a meme and, you know, if we want to get into the evidence for their benefit, it's kind of shaky and oversold. But none of that really matters because

doing it sucks. Like actually getting in it really sucks. It's not exactly a pleasant or easy thing, but if you can get in a cold plunge and stay in it for a couple of minutes, a lot of other stuff doesn't feel that hard anymore. You know, my wife has been using this as a mantra for a few years now because she gave birth to both of our children without medication. And she'll really often say to herself, like, well, if I can do that, I can get through this other thing, right? Like all of these little hard things that you commit yourself to doing, just build up more and more of your

identity as a capable person. And so even if they don't serve some specific financial bottom line or serve some specific goal, it's often worth doing them just for the sake of your identity. The Navy SEALs talk about always pushing their edges. And because they know they're going to go into the thick of it all the time. That's their life. And, and I think that. That is a mantra that we all can borrow and use.

Like, what am I doing a prompt? An end of the day prompt could be, what did I do today to push my edges? When I mean edges, like, here's our zone of comforting competency, right? I'm this level of intelligence. I'm this comfortable in whatever I'm doing. What am I doing to push on those edges? Maybe meet with somebody who's far wiser than me. Be curious, learn from them, try to hang in that environment.

That's honestly one of the reasons I do this podcast. and I have for nine years, and that is to try to hang with really smart, thoughtful people and have constructive dialogue with them. That pushes my edges of my zone of competency, right? Like a real thoughtful dude like, I'm like, wow, I'm going to have to really bring it today.

So there's hours and hours of preparation, being a good listener. It's like, I'm going to be a better leader from having done this. The same thing with anything physical or mental, right? What did you do today to push your edges? And if you have examples for that day after day after day, as you said, that I think you're providing evidence for yourself that you can handle the hard things that are inevitably going

to come at you. And I think that's a really good skill to nurture and to develop. Totally. And it doesn't just have to be physical things. And after I turned in Crypto Confidential, I wanted to write this sci-fi novel. And I said, okay, you know, I'm going to try to write this. I've never written a novel before. I've no idea how to do it,

but I'm going to commit to writing 2,000 words a day until the draft is done. And 2,000 words a day is a lot of words. That's a pretty high output. But Stephen King's on writing book is wonderful. And he said that that was how he did it. He would start on the first draft, write 2,000 words a day until it was done. And you give himself three months to finish it. And I said, you know what, I'm just going to try.

I'm going to see if I can actually. do that. And I would basically go to a coffee shop and not let myself leave until I had gotten the 2,000 words for the day done. And that might have meant that I was starving for lunch or whatever and just needed to bang out a couple of bad paragraphs to hit it. But I got done and it wasn't bad. And I got the whole first draft done in two months because it was about 76,000 words. And, you know, two months of work days is about 50 days. And so with there was like Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday in there too. And I just, I got it done.

And I didn't know I could do that, but I was able to. And then I talking about pushing your edges, right? Everybody, or not everybody, but a lot of people say, oh, 2000 words is a great goal to get to, 2000 words a day. And then I started thinking like, well, that's, that's still just a number that somebody made up. It's sort of an arbitrary marker, right? It's like, like if you stop doing pushups at a round number, it means you didn't do as many as you actually could have done, right? If you stop at 20 or 25, you didn't really push

yourself. So I said, well, okay, how much further can I push this? And so I just started adding 100 words a day every week as I was working on, I think the second draft or later in the first draft. And so one week I did 2,100 words a day and then 2,200 words a day and 2300. I got up to 2,600 words a day before I finished whichever draft that was. And it wasn't that much harder. Like, it was harder. It took a little bit longer, obviously. I needed to budget an extra 30, 45 minutes, but I figured out how to do it. And it's like, okay, I know I can do 2,500 words a day on a decently organized outline for a book now, which means that whenever I do a first draft of something in the future, I basically have no excuse for it to take more than two or three months. And that's

an incredibly empowering thing to know because a lot of people might spend the months and months and months and months doing 100, 200, 300 word days. I'm not saying that's bad, but if you know you can do more, that's a pretty useful thing to know about yourself. Oh, no doubt. Just came to me that you are a really thoughtful and intentional dude, especially for being still so earlier in your career. And it led me to think, what was your upbringing like? What were your parents like? What did they do to help nurture and develop such a thoughtful and intentional person, especially early on in your career? It's a good question. You know, both, both, my parents were lawyers and my dad left practice when I was in kindergarten so he could be stay at home

with us because he was working as a federal prosecutor and my mom was in private practice. And so, you know, her income was higher at that point just because, you know, government doesn't pay its prosecutors very much. And I, you know, the thing that I think was really fortunate was that because they were both lawyers, we lived in northern Virginia, right by D.C., and it's the best school district in the country. So I had really, really good schools from day one, and that does make a big difference. That said, I really wasn't much of a student. I was much more interested in other things, and I kind of had this sense that a lot of what I was learning in school didn't matter or wasn't worth focusing on, but I was very curious about other things. And so I was learning other things

outside of class. And there's, you know, I ended up finding kind of a home in video games, but not so much playing them. I mean, well, yes, playing them a lot, but also like figuring out the systems within them and kind of how I could game them or what else I could do in there. And I mean, even in elementary school, Warcraft 3 was sort of the best. big game back then. And there were all these Warcraft custom maps. And you could log online and you could play custom maps with other people. And I actually got into the map editor. And I was like editing these game maps that other people could play with in elementary school, I think. It was either like fifth, sixth grade or maybe seventh grade. It was somewhere in that time period that

this was happening. And I was just really curious to figure these things out. And I was always, I think a pretty independent kid too and that led to conflict with them but I think they knew at what point to just let me go and either figure it out or fail on my own right to not completely restrict my attempts to go do that and I think you know that's that's definitely a hard boundary to decide on as a parent because they you know more so my dad definitely wanted me to be like a straight A student, very school focused, and I just wasn't. I would do sort of the bare minimum to get high B's or low A's and then go back to my video games, which was obviously very frustrating, but I think, but he, I think just trusted that I would

figure something out eventually. And despite that, despite not being much of a student, in eighth grade, I actually, I had a close friend who was Korean and her parents were moving back to Korea but wanted her to get an American education. And so she was looking at all of these brochures for boarding high schools. And she started showing them to me. And I thought, this sounds like the coolest thing ever. You get to go live on campus and take all these cool classes. And you get to pick a lot of your curriculum. It's not set for you. You know, this sounds amazing. And so I came home in eighth grade and I must have been like 12 and presented this stuff to my parents and said, I want to do this. And they'd never even heard really of these like good

boarding schools before they thought boarding school. And I thought too, boarding school was a place where you send the bad kids. But there was this like, you know, elite cadre of New England boarding schools that were the old feeders for the IVs or whatnot. And they had these incredible programs and stuff. And I said I wanted to do this. And I didn't get in the first year, but I got in for sophomore year. And I ended up going sophomore junior and senior year. And that was definitely the most useful education experience I had. I think primarily because it required, me to like take care of myself more from an earlier age because you're living on campus and

you have to feed yourself and you have to keep your room somewhat clean and you have to get yourself to class and you have to do all this stuff that a lot of people don't have to do until college and maybe not even then. And I think just being at boarding school and getting to take a few classes that I was super interested in, they had, you know, they had like AP micro and AP macro, which were the typical econ classes that you might take in high school. But then they had six more beyond that, that there weren't even AP. tests for because normally high schoolers don't even take these things. So I took like an entrepreneurship class and a international monetary policy class and gosh, there were a couple of others and,

you know, doing more advanced physics and more advanced math. And it was that, I think, set me up way more than college did. Wow. But that's a huge decision. As a dad, I can't imagine sending my kids away before college because you're gone. You're not. It's essentially like you're in college, right? You probably come home for the holidays, but other than that, you're gone, right? Yeah, you only came back every six weeks or so. There would be the holidays and then there would be long weekends in between. But yeah, as a parent, you think, okay, I've got them at home until 18 and then they come to you at 12 and say, actually, I want to go now, which is pretty wild. So you probably grew up until I was 14, but. So you grew up quicker. I mean, I feel like you're

forced to grow up quicker, become an adult earlier than most people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my my parents, one story that they like to tell is, I think this was my sophomore year. And I would take the train to get to school because I lived in D.C. And the school was in Connecticut outside of New Haven. So I would take the train from D.C. to New Haven on Amtrak, which is a wonderful train ride. I loved that. And then would get a cab to go from the train station to school. and one year or one one return trip that year the train from New York to New Haven was out and we didn't know when they dropped me off at the train station and so I got to New York and they said okay everybody off the train because you know the lines out and so it drops us in Penn Station and then I you know we didn't I didn't really I mean I had a smartphone but you know that was like the edge era.

days. I don't think we even had 3G. Yeah. So I somehow looked up that you could also take Metro North instead of Amtrak to get from New York to New Haven, went from Penn Station to Grand Central Station and like got a ticket on Metro North and got on the train and took it up to school and then got to school that way. And then I didn't even tell them about it until later that night where I said, oh, hey, by the way, like this thing happened. And that's just, I mean, and that was kind of a normal thing for a kid in boarding school.

You know, you just figured this stuff out, even if you were 14. or whatnot. And having to level up maturity-wise at that age, I think is really powerful. Because I actually do think that a lot of the adolescents struggle between kids and parents is because adolescents are actually really capable. They're still kind of stupid, but they're generally pretty capable. And parents are holding them back and schools holding them back from their full capability. And that's why they have to lash out and gain independence in these other ways because they're not having that independence served in their normal environment. And so getting to have that independence, I think was really, really powerful.

I mean, I don't know if you saw this going around Twitter today. McKinsey did some study where 20% of college graduates are bringing their parents to their job interviews. I didn't believe it. I was like, there's no way. There's no way. It's wild. Yeah.

And so now as a parent, I'm very much like, okay, what opportunities can I give my kids to foster that independence and that sense of competence as early as possible because that's really one of the best assets you can have for anything in life is how competent do you see yourself to be? This is so hard because this conversation I have with my wife quite a bit now with teenagers is that as a dad, do you want them to call you if they need something? You want to say, like, I got you. I'm here for you. However, in a way, it's stunting the growth at times. So we have to have this dialogue in a way we almost have to like not answer the phone and it is so so hard because you want them to be able to figure it out on their own and if you answer and figure it out every time

or you come in and save the day and you feel like this amazing parent because you save the day when your child was going through something or they didn't know the answer to whatever as opposed to saying you know nat probably taught himself and created some confidence in himself by figuring it out of like, how do I get go to a different train station or how do I get a ticket? And by doing that, you created evidence for yourself that you can do hard things. And your parents didn't intentionally do that, but they did in a way by saying, you know, this is where you're going. You have to figure it out. And I think that's the tough balance, right? And as your kids get over, I'm sure you guys will have to think about that. How do you balance out this hardship that's

needed? But also, you've got to be able to just pull away. It's just a tough, tough thing. Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, I'm excited to get to think about that more, though. How old are your kids? Two and a half and one. Yeah. So, you know, we don't get many opportunities to experiment with this, but, you know, our two and a half year old is kind of curious about those kinds of things. And so we will be at an outdoor coffee shop or something.

And we might be like sitting at the table and she'll spill something and get upset and say she wants a paper towel. and we'll actually let her go back up to the coffee shop and get it herself because she can, you know, reach up and pull it from the paper towel dispenser. And it's funny to do that because you can see a lot of other people looking at her and going, what is this two-year-old doing wandering over here alone? Right? They start looking around for the parents or whatnot. And we have to kind of like wave and say like, no, we know she's there. It's okay. But I think it's great for her because she's learning, okay, I can go solve this problem myself.

I don't need them to go do it for me all the time. There are little checkpoints along the way, along the days. Something as little as I know when we take a friend to dinner, you can see. Like, one of the big rules we said is we are never ordering dinner for them, as long as they can talk, like they're going to order dinner for themselves, whether it's Chipotle or we're sitting down. It doesn't matter. And sometimes though, you take a friend and their friend has never ordered for themselves

in their entire lives and they're eight years old or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And I think that is a thing where it's just a reminder of like, Well, okay, this is a thing that I think is good. That's just one tiny example. But as much as humanly possible, get them used to speaking to adults, shaking hands, looking them in the eye, having conversations, being able to speak, standing up for themselves, asking questions, ordering for themselves, all of those things, I hope create some sort

of belief in oneself, some independence, some of this, like, I can do it type things. So there's a lot of little checkpoints. And I think that's a great example you share along the way. Okay. By the, okay, we got way off topic. I want to get a little bit to crypto. It was fun, though. Okay.

It is fun. I love it. So your book, Crypto Confidential, is getting so much amazing press. It's not at the time of this recording, it's not out yet. But so much amazing press, I appreciate your team for sending me an early copy because I am one of those people in the world. I remember I downloaded Coinbase a couple years ago and bought some crypto on Coinbase. I had no idea what I'm doing.

I still don't have any idea what I'm doing. So when your PR team sent some stuff over, I'm like, hmm, I'm interested to learn more about this. So I read though that becoming a new dad actually impacted your crypto decisions. So can you take me back to that moment when you became a dad and how that impacted your crypto decisions? So the way I kind of stumbled into this world was I got interested in crypto really early a couple of times and then got more interested in 2017, dabbled a bit, the whole market crashed at the end of 2017 or I guess beginning of 2018 and I said okay I feel like there's something maybe here eventually but I got to go work on other stuff you know I'm not going to

keep following this right now but I set up these automatic weekly buys on Coinbase where it would just take I think $100 out of my bank account each week and put it into Bitcoin and was this I said like 2017 2018 okay so early early early yeah. And I said, you know, I'm not going to try to time this. I'm just going to let it do these weekly buys and maybe that'll turn it to something eventually. And so that had been running for years and it gets to the end of 2020. And I've been running a marketing agency. It almost got killed by COVID. I sort of had to resuscitate it during that period. And then by the end of the year, I was ready to step out, promote the CEO. She took over and I said, okay, I want to go find something

new to do because I don't like doing, I was doing a lot of SEO content marketing and I didn't like doing that work anymore. I was really, really tired of it. But I'd always really enjoyed programming and writing. And I thought, well, I don't think I can make a like good enough living from just writing right now. And if I did, it would have to be the like content marketing SEO writing, which I didn't want to do. So I'm going to actually like try to go after programming because my experience was really limited with it. I played around it bits and pieces just to have fun. And so I start taking these programming courses and then I see all of this chatter around crypto happening. And I open up my Coinbase and those little weekly buys plus, you know, the bit that

I had at the end of 2017 was like $80,000. And it was this holy shit, but like, where did this come from? This is insane. What happened here? And I, so I started digging. It was like, oh, my God, There's all that cool stuff going on. There's, like, defy, and there's Ethereum, and Dogecoin is going crazy. And so I download Robin Hood, and I start day trading Dogecoin on my phone, and I'm making a little bit of money there. And at the same time, I'm trying to get this programming stuff going. And at the same time, I don't know, it is wild that we decided to do all of this, but my

wife was also in a new career. I was figuring out a new career, and we decided to start trying to have our first kid. So, and we figured it would take. six to 12 months for her to get pregnant because, you know, a lot of times it does. And we'd have that plus the pregnancy to figure everything out. And then boom, she gets pregnant the second month. And so now the timeline has been contracted quite a bit. It's February.

And I don't have a job. I have savings. And I have some income from my blog, but, you know, not exactly as much as I'd like. And I'm not even sure at this point if the programming is going to take off quickly enough for me to get a good income in six months or whatnot. And so I went to my friend who was way deeper in crypto than I was. And I said, can you help me figure out this crazy part of the industry? And she said yes. And it just went bananas from there. Because, you know, she was in this like one of those secret group chats where all of the alpha gets shared. And, you know, she couldn't exactly share stuff that was in it.

But she could point me in interesting directions. Then I could go try to figure things out. And, you know, That was in, that was really in like April when that started. And, you know, so in April, I'm just trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this industry, seeing if I can make any money from it. And then by December, I'm, I've ended up working with this crypto gaming team and I wrote a lot of the code for their tokens and everything. And people have put over $100 million into the game, the code that I had written for the game, basically. and now I'm like not sleeping at night because all of this other people's money is on the line. My paper net worth, what all of my coins that are either, you know, locked or unlocking or that I already have my wallet or whatnot, all that is supposedly worth like $13 million.

And I just have like all of this just crazy shit going on and it's driving me insane. So all of that is like in a 10 month period once I decided to get into it. Wow. Well, I mean, what happened next? Got to read the book. No, but what happened next is the biggest thing. And part of why I ended up writing it was the money really corrupts you really quickly. Where it, you know, when I first started working with this team, they had no money to pay me. And I had asked to get paid in Eith, you know, in Ethereum. And they couldn't do that. And so I agreed to just get paid in the tokens for the game and that the amount of tokens they gave me ended up turning into this absurd amount of money.

But then you run into all these problems of, you know, you can only sell so much without moving the market on a lot of these really like volatile tokens. And so you can't actually like exit your position. A lot of your tokens are locked up. And you never know when you're at the peak. And so the token started at 10 cents ran up. to $13. And you would think that if you had something that you got at 10 cents, that's now worth $13

in your head, you would go, I got to sell all of us. I got to get out right now. Like, this is the end. But that's not what you're thinking. What you're thinking is, well, this other one went up to this price, which for us would mean we're going to $100. So, you know, sure, if I cash out, you know, a few million dollars here, I'll have like a decent comfortable nest egg.

But if I wait another month or two, I might be able to fully retire us. our children and just be done forever. It just, you completely lose all sense of rationality unless you are one of these, you know, incredibly sharky traders, which I wasn't. You know, I just got totally lost in the chaos and, you know, ended up, you know, now the token's at like two cents. So you never, never were able to cash out and get the millions. I was able to cash out some, you know, I was able to cash out a good amount.

And I definitely had a great outcome from it, but nowhere close to what I thought I was getting out. And then you run into all of these other crazy consequences. Like, in crypto, everything is public. So you can see all the transactions that are happening. So when somebody sells a bunch of a token, if somebody wants to, they can go figure out which wallet sold the token. And because I had just taken this job as a freelance gig and I didn't think it was going to turn into anything, I just had them set it up. so that all the tokens went to the wallet that had my name on it. It said Natalaisen. Dot, Eath.

And then people could see like, well, Natalaisen. Dot Eath just sold $25,000 of this token. And, you know, he's working with the team. So what does he know? Or is he scamming us? Or is he, you know, like, what does this mean? And so I'm dealing with all this shit from the community and having to fight with them. And, you know, in my head, I'm thinking, well, I don't want to sell because I think it's going higher and because the optics of it are bad.

And over 70% of my family's network. worth is in this stupid fucking coin net. If I don't sell some and get out what I can, then it could be the worst mistake of my life. And the thing that I did end up doing that really saved me is I just set a specific percent of, you know, I would have a certain number of tokens that unlocked each day based on my one-year vesting schedule. And then I just sold a certain amount of them at whatever the market price was every day. And, you know, that was my, I'm not going to try to time this. going to try to, you know, wait for the right moment and I'm not going to try to make it look like I have special insider knowledge leading me to sell or not sell just every day,

sell a certain amount and follow that rule. But, you know, even that created all of these just like challenges too. Well, money can play such a good or a bad role in relationships. What were your conversations like with your wife during this time? It was really challenging. It was really, it was really a struggle. And I talk about that a good amount in the book. I think that's one of the things that surprises people about it is it's pretty raw about the strain that it put. Sorry, just in a second. And there were multiple moments where I either got hacked or thought I was getting hacked and felt like I was about to lose everything.

And so I'm running out of dinner or running out of a pickleball game or waking up in the middle of the night because something awful has or might have happened. And, you know, I'm telling her that we've made all this money, but I'm leaving most of it in crypto. And so it's not coming out to our bank account. And so a lot of that money wasn't even real. It never even became real. And, you know, I'm just like checking the prices like every second that I have. I'm just on my phone, on the trading apps, on the coin tracking apps, like, what's the token out?

Where do you other tokens at? What's our net worth now? Right. Like, what's going on? and just completely blind to everything else that was going on in my life. So not being present with her, not being present with our newborn, just not like being a good person, honestly. And that was a big part of what ended up pulling me out of it and making me not want to go back into it was just seeing how deep those hooks got in me and being scared of that in the sense that, you know, if I wanted to go full force into crypto and try to run. the same playbook with this cycle that's starting now or, you know, started six months ago.

Like, I could probably do pretty well. It would probably go great, but I'm extremely afraid of that, you know, and, and don't want to do it. I thought that was important to capture too. It's kind of like the dog chasing the car. You're not ready for what happens if you catch it. And I really wasn't. That leads me to my next question, which was you decide to document this and open up your life for others to read about, including some very personal parts. Why do that? I mean, you're a great writer. You write about a lot of topics that are super engaging. We've spent the first half plus of this conversation talking about all those things. Why say, like, hey, I'm going to write

crypto confidential. A few reasons. I mean, selfishly, I've always wanted to make the pivot into writing full time. And I'd never had a good excuse to do it. And, And I didn't feel totally comfortable taking any of my blog topics and trying to turn them into a nonfiction book. And so the crypto market was declining. I had decided to get out of the game because the impact it was having on me. And then I started to look at the past year and said, there's a good story here. This could be my in to getting a first book deal. And I think that I got really lucky in a few ways.

you know, one, I was pretty active on the degenerate gambling side of the crypto game. And I actually learned how to program smart contracts on Ethereum and was deploying code and people put money in the code and helped launch a token and worked with the team. And like Three Arrow's Capital, one of the big guys who blew up, they invested in the company that I was working with. And there was a bunch of shady shit that happened there. And I got to see all of that. And I got to see it from a perspective that there were certainly a bunch of other Nats.

There were certainly a bunch of other people who had similar experiences, but most of them probably didn't have the writing chops or the commitment to actually turn it into a story about that time period. And most of the people who did have the writing chops talk about that time period were going to do journalistic books from the outside looking in. And I thought it would be really fun to have an inside story, what it was actually like on the ground level from that mania because there were just so many insane things going on. And I think it will be a time period that we look back on at everything that happened, at GameStop, at crypto, at recovering from COVID. That 2020 to 22 period was so crazy that this can be a cool artifact of that era. And it's about crypto, but it's really about the human experience of fully diving into a financial mania and kind of losing yourself in it and your relationship with money and self and people. And that's a pretty timeless story. So even if somebody doesn't have that much interest in getting into crypto, they could still get a lot from that side of it.

And then I think you layer on that it's a fun read. It's fast. It's like thrillery, right? Like it's exciting and easy to get through. And so it's got that element too where you could almost read it instead of a James Patterson novel on the beach or something, you know, with the added benefit that you learn something along the way. But it's been compared to Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short, which was turned into a movie. Do you, are you guys in talks? Like, are you going to option this?

Do you think there's any chance that it's something like that happens? One producer actually reached out about optioning it. And we didn't take that right away. And now we're shopping it a little bit. And this is actually a good reminder that I should go check in on how that's doing. Because on the one hand. And the nice thing with the big short and money ball and a movie like easy money or dumb money, you know, the GameStop one is those were all really big characters in the events that happened.

And I know Michael Lewis optioned his book on SBF. And I think that got picked up by Apple TV. And I suspect something will come of that. But I would love to see this get made into a movie. I think there'd be a lot of fun ways. There are fun things you could do with it. I think it would be kind of a fun story to get the movie treatment. And I didn't explicitly write it with that in mind, but it was a thought at the back of my head that it would be a fun thing to get to see that get done.

Yeah. Now, I really appreciate your time. I just looked at the clock. I was like, whoa, it's been like an hour. It's flown by, which is really cool. It's a good sign. But I'm curious, given how thoughtful and intentional you are, as mentioned before, let's say your meeting with somebody who's a bit earlier. in their career than you are.

Maybe they're a college graduate. And they want to do good in the world. They want to leave a positive dent. But they're not exactly sure yet what they want to do. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? I think that people get flack for career hopping and career changing too quickly. But I think that's one of the most useful things you can do early in your work career. because school and hobbies can never really tell you what you would actually be fulfilled

working on for very long time periods. And so over the last nine years, I've run a marketing agency, I've done programming work, I've done writing, I've actually worked in marketing at a company, I've started little app businesses. I've gotten to try on a bunch of things. And before that, I did some internships at like management consulting companies, right? And I really do feel like you have to actually try whatever types of jobs you think you might enjoy doing. And then once you find really, it's not the job or the company or the industry, it's the type of work that you enjoy doing.

I can wake up every day and want to get better at and could actually want to become the best in the world at. I think it's one of the most useful things you can try to figure out. And then once you figure that out, you just have to go totally all in on that thing. And to be pretty explicit about not letting yourself get distracted by the other things. There's a, I think it's a Warren Buffett quote that I love, which is like list out the top 10 things you could be focusing your time on, right? Like the most important things you could be working on and now start working on the first one and then put two through 10 on your wall because those are the things that you can never, ever start working on. Because that's how you fail is the shadow career. the number two, three, four things on your list that aren't really the most important,

most fulfilling work to you, but they're tempting distractions. And for me, that's entrepreneurship. That's a certain amount of programming. That's this crypto stuff. That's building a social media influencer presence. That's, for me, that's starting a podcast, right? All of those things are not writing for me. And writing is the thing.

And that is the thing that I'm just fully committed to figuring out. and I feel extremely confident saying that because I tried all these other things first. And so I really, I almost think it's a mistake to immediately pick something and go all in on that because if you pick the wrong thing, you might not find out until 10, 20 years down the line. And now you have a mortgage in kids and it's way harder to pivot and try something else. But you can take a ton of risks early in your career. You can have a low burn. You can try these different hats on.

And then once you find the thing, you know, you could wait until you're in like your 30s to find that thing. and then just go all in on it and still have an incredibly successful career. And so I think that that explore and exploit framework is a really, really valuable one to follow. So useful, man. I'm excited to see your writing and your focus on it and to see what comes next. But the current thing that I highly encourage, as you mentioned, is it's a thriller. It's like a novel, but it's real.

I think it's going to be a movie. It's called Crypto Confidential winning and Lue. losing millions in the new frontier of finance. Nat, this is really cool, man. I appreciate you being here, and I would love to continue our dialogue as we've got to progress, man. This is a great chat. So thanks for having the on, Ryan.

Awesome. Thanks, man. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Nat Eliasson. A few takeaways from my notes. I really enjoyed the part of our conversation.

where we talked through how to make our days more memorable. Throw parties with three or four different phases. When taking your loved one out on a date, have three distinct different parts. Implement Matthew Dick's homework for life, write down the stories of each day. This will help you remember them more. This will help you create memory dividends, as Bill Perkins talked about on this podcast and his book, Die with Zero. We should do more hard things.

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. Like Nat's story of having to figure out how to get where he is going when the train was out of commission. Really good one. And then I appreciated how vulnerable Nat got when talking about the challenges of the crypto world and how that impact.

his marriage. It caused some strife and forced some really tough conversations with his wife. And money can cause issues. And Nat doesn't shy away from talking about those, both on this podcast as well as in his book, Crypto Confidential. Once again, I say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Nat Eliasson. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. Because you continue to do that and you continue to go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you write a review and you subscribe to the show and you rate it hopefully five stars and by doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk you soon. Can't wait.