The Wolf Of All Streets - How to be rich AND happy with Koroush AK

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Koroush AK has set out on a path to find the perfect balance between his trades, investments, mentality, and health. Through all the noise in the crypto space, Koroush has become a pillar of reliable ...advice. Educating everyone, from beginners to experts, in the crypto market. Whether you are looking for advice on trading, meditation, or just success in life, Koroush AK has a little bit of wisdom to impart for everyone.    In this episode, Melker and Koroush discuss a range of topics including:  Meditating and trading Bull market memes Balance in the market Exercise, sleep, diet, and health “More money, more problems” Copy-trading Homeless lottery winners Going stupid long on Bitcoin Income ≠ happiness Utility of a college degree The ultimate store of value ---- MAKERSPLACE MakersPlace is the go-to premium marketplace for purchasing rare digital artworks from the world’s top creators (Ie. José Delbo, Trevor Jones, Pak, SSX3LAU, Shu Lea Cheang). New artworks are dropped twice a week, where they typically sell out within seconds of release and have been reselling several months later, upwards of 10x. Subscribe for exclusive drop notifications at https://makersplace.com/thewolf ---- Try Nexo’s full-suite, instant crypto banking service, featuring: Savings accounts with up to 12% interest on crypto, stablecoins & fiat Flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR An exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and best-price guarantee All this and more wrapped up in a single Nexo Wallet. Start banking at nexo.io Or download the app on Google Play or the App Store.   ---- Legacy of Dead  This episode was brought to you by Bitcasino. The worlds leading Bitcoin-led online casino and crypto-centric gaming destination. Wager your way into a world of opportunity, with the ultimate Fun, Fast and Fair crypto-casino experience.  Deposit, wager, and withdraw in real-time with a host of top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), LiteCoin (LTC), Tether (USDT), TRON (TRX), Ripple (XRP), and more!  Use the promo link Bitcasino.io/Scott, to unlock your 200 FREE SPINS in the Legacy of Dead Promotion. ---- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members ---- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is a good friend who shares a similar approach to life and markets as I do. Whether you're trading or investing, maintaining balance in your life and emotions is extremely important to achieving long-term profitability and, frankly, to achieving long-term happiness. Khrushchev has taken this idea to the next level, giving incredible advice in his own newsletter called Market Meditations on his podcast and on his YouTube channel. It's my intention on this podcast to better understand the importance of life balance to improve your trading and how that balance can be achieved because we know that it's an eternal struggle for all of us who try to
Starting point is 00:00:42 achieve it. Khrush, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's an absolute pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me. Of course. So before we get into the questions, once again, you're all listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities in the worlds of Bitcoin, art, finance, sports, politics, basically anyone who has a good story to tell. This podcast is powered by Blockworks. They are the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. What they're doing is pretty mind boggling. You can check them out at blockworks.co. And if you like this podcast,
Starting point is 00:01:11 much like my esteemed guest today, I also have a newsletter, a website, all of these things. You can check everything out at thewolfofallstreets.io. So back in August of last year, you posted an epic meme video of the Avengers with all the Twitter avatars. And I've now spent a year wondering, waking up in the morning thinking, will I see another one of these? Do you have plans for another one of those for us? You know, those memes take so much time.
Starting point is 00:01:39 People don't respect the art of memeing enough. Like we put together a whole movie script for that thing, plan every detail. I mean, I think that's what makes a really epic meme. Otherwise you're just putting out something which is funny and good, but to get it to that scale for like two minutes with motion tracking all over the place, getting every key person and CTN, hopefully I will earn enough to do enough to which I can dedicate my life fully to memeing. But until then, it's going to be a while till we do something that grand again. But memeing has become a job. I actually see job listings now from a lot of companies and stuff, especially in this
Starting point is 00:02:14 space saying hiring someone full time to basically create memes. I mean, if something gets you like, I think that got us about 400,000 impressions. People pay a lot of money for 400,000 impressions. So if you can hire someone full time to consistently get you that sort of engagement, then memeing is super powerful. I mean, some tokens that have launched in the space right now run entire campaigns based off of memes. It's like, it's great marketing and community building because it's humor. People love humor. It's easy to get behind. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So now beyond the memes, as I said, the introduction, what I find so engaging about you as a person and as a content
Starting point is 00:02:56 creator and everything is that you just seem to have this incredible balance. And I know that that can be smoke and mirrors depending on the time, your life for anyone. But I want to talk about the importance generally of trying to achieve that and how that affects your trading. Because I know that we have a lot of traders here from advanced all the way down to completely beginners who are taking their first trade. And there's so many stories about there and lessons about what people need to do to improve their trading and to me it's just about having a balance in life and not being consumed and obsessed so i just want to kind of talk to you generally about how you came to that and why it's so important so i guess we could begin by defining balance um and i guess that would be approaching it from multiple angles, making
Starting point is 00:03:47 sure you're healthy, eating well, sleeping well, happy, also making money and pursuing trading. I mean, that's where I'd start with the definition of balance. And it's something which became very important to me when I actually gave myself insomnia for about two and a half years, pretty bad insomnia. When I first, I put together a trading system in 2018 that was making me a lot of money to the point where sleeping was costing me four or five figures. Like if I didn't wake up a couple of times in the night, I was missing opportunities to just make thousands of dollars. And at that point, I hadn't built a trading system that was that good and doing so well. It had a hit rate of like 97%. And as a mathematician, I knew like, this isn't going to last very long. Like, this is not going to last very long. I need to take advantage of it and ride it as long as I can.
Starting point is 00:04:39 So I started setting alarms in the middle of the night. I'd wake up five to 15 times because this was on the five, 15 minute timeframe trading. And all I was doing was trading. I went to the hairdressers and I was on the phone having my girlfriend execute a trade for me. That's how obsessed I was with not missing a single opportunity and just maximizing this. And then I got the insomnia. My happiness was down the drain. I absolutely love fitness and exercise that went down. My emotions were all over the place. And there had to be a change because my trading started to suffer. I get into fights and do stupid stuff on the charts, like open $100,000 position just for the sake of it to see what happens and see if I could just make $200 off of it. You know, something
Starting point is 00:05:31 really stupid and unnecessary. And that stuff happens because when you trade, you're not trying to trade for a year or two years. Generally, if you're building and honing this skill, you need to be able to sustain it over an entire career because we have full responsibility. One emotional mistake and it's all gone. Years and years of profit can just disappear. And I'm sure you're aware, Scott, as well. You're a fantastic trader. And well, when you realize this, suddenly more important than your technical analysis, more important than your risk management is to keep your emotions in check because that's a binary. If your emotions allow you to stick to your system, you'll continue making money. If they don't, you've just got this very probable event that could wipe you out at any point. So balance became pretty important. And then for something a
Starting point is 00:06:21 little more actionable, what I implemented was sort of four pillars I like to maintain my health and balance on. The first one being sleep. Sleep is so important to the point where it can have more of an impact on your physical performance than steroids, getting a good night's sleep before a competition. So an athlete on steroids that's had a bad night's sleep is at a less advantageous position than one that's had a really good night's sleep. It's that level of impact on your body, your mind, it's equivalent. Then after that diet, making sure I'm hydrated, I'm eating well, then exercise really helps me. It raises my mood. It keeps me feeling healthy and energetic. And the final one, which I mean, you know, the newsletter is called Market Meditations. I
Starting point is 00:07:11 absolutely adore meditating and it's brought a lot of benefit to my life. How much do you meditate in a week, a day, a week? And how did you build up to whatever that level is? I ask, you know, you say asking for a friend, I'm asking for myself because I have an extremely overactive mind. You know, I have ADHD and I joke with my wife, I cannot visualize things. They say, visualize yourself sitting on a beach. And I like might see a snapshot or something, but I can't ever get there no matter how hard I try. It's just not the way my mind works. So I'm like five minutes and out. And then a week later, I'm not meditating anymore. I find it very, very difficult. Well, I mean, I love that you want to pursue it. I'm not sure how much it would help with the imagination side of things. But it could certainly have positive impacts, I believe on anyone's life. And it doesn't have to be the like,
Starting point is 00:08:04 you know, sit down meditation, people can find other forms of meditation, like some people can find it in yoga, some people can find it in taking long walks, there are multiple forms, but the core principles remain the same. What meditation does is it hones two things really well, which you can argue are one thing, but we'll keep it as two separate things. There's awareness, and then there's attention. So with awareness, it's not like you suddenly get magical control over your emotions. You still get just as angry. You still get just as greedy, or you still feel fear. But the difference is with meditation, by spending so much time paying attention to your thoughts and feelings, as soon as you get scared or you feel FOMO or FUD, you're aware of it. So if I enter a trade, I'm aware of what my emotions are as I'm doing it, which allows me to act upon it, if that makes sense. So you notice what you're feeling, so you can then act upon it. And then
Starting point is 00:09:07 this has suddenly a compounding effect, because the more time you spend noticing these feelings, the more comfortable you become with these feelings. So you're still feeling them exactly the same. They're just losing their control over you. So the way to develop this with meditating is just sitting and spending time with your emotions, doing nothing but observing absolutely everything going on. Then there's another element to it, which is attention as well, which helps you focus on certain tasks. It helps you develop willpower and efficiently exert your willpower as well. And to answer your question on how much time I will spend meditating. Well, I started with five minutes a
Starting point is 00:09:46 day. And then that five minutes, went up to six minutes, went up to seven, eight, and then really slowly compounded up. And I focused on just building the habit, doing it. The first stage of meditation is the most difficult. That's just doing it every day. Turning up is, yeah, show up. That's harder than achieving mastery. You just do it every day with intent and you'll find your way there. So right now I'm back to 10 minutes, but the times where I've made my most progress is when I've been doing one to two hours a day. Right now, there's just a bit too much work for me to dedicate that much time. But when I was doing one to two hours, the developments, the insights, which come, it's life-changing to the point where like most people will think, wouldn't even believe it if I went into detail of how much
Starting point is 00:10:34 impact it can have on your life. I sometimes wonder how much of it is just your ability to like detach from your phone and the other things in your life, any excuse, you know, because I find, for example, surfing to be meditative for me only because I'm out there and I'm thinking about one thing. So it's not, you know, I'm not getting, I guess, perhaps that awareness of my feelings and emotions, but I'm at least detached from everything else, which I find to be a big challenge in life these days, you know, play with my kids kids with my phone in the other room as opposed to in my pocket. Really little things, but they make a huge difference.
Starting point is 00:11:09 Well, it does because the phone is a distraction coming up. If you're paying attention to your phone, you're not paying attention to how you're feeling. You're not paying attention to, for example, how many times have you seen people really scrunched up and frowning looking at their phone or even smiling and happy because they've read a text that like they like they're not aware of how they're reacting to this object because their attention isn't on themselves it's completely encompassed by the phone and that's why surfing could actually be immensely meditative this is actually something we spoke about um in my second ever podcast episode with BTC Jack Sparrow,
Starting point is 00:11:45 awesome Twitter account, really nice guy. I think he's been on your show as well. So he surfs and we were talking about it because when you're surfing, you have to focus on your body. You have to focus on the sensations, your balance, and then you can, it forces awareness. And that's why it's so much more powerful than focusing on the phone. Because if you focus too much on the wave, you can't focus on your body and your balance and you're going to fall over. If you focus too much on yourself, you're not paying attention to your environment. So it like forces you to spread that awareness. What struck me from something you said earlier was that you obviously had this system, it was hitting 97% hit rate, which is astounding.
Starting point is 00:12:26 I've certainly never come anywhere close to that with any system that I've developed. So it implies that you were making an immense amount of money. But while making that money and having that success, you were actually becoming less happy, right? Well, first, I'd like to dive in that one, one thing which allowed this really high hit rate was that it was a very small opportunity, like window of opportunity, right? It didn't last for very long. Secondly, I was taking on a very large amount of risk. So that 3% where I did lose, I lost a lot more than I was winning every time. So whenever anyone says 97% hit rate, there's always contingencies to it. Also, the position sizes were a little bit limited. Like, yes, I could make four figures, roughly four figures per trade, but I wanted to go to like much above that. Suddenly slippage comes in
Starting point is 00:13:18 because these aren't the most liquid pairs I'm trading and a whole bunch of other stuff compounds on top to make it not scalable. And then the happiness question to get onto that part. I found Scott, and I think you'd resonate with this, that really is outside of financial freedom, no correlation whatsoever between how much you earn and how happy you are. And people don't like to hear that because it's something only rich people say. There's a reason every rich people says it, guys. Like every rich person says it because it is true. Once you hit financial freedom, none of your problems go away when you get money. And just
Starting point is 00:13:58 earning more money is just chasing this mindless goal that has no end result from it. In fact, moving away from chasing money is one of the things that has helped me be way happier and way more successful in life. I think actually, to some degree, it amplifies the same problems that were there before, which I found it's funny, you know, in this kind of bull run over the last six months, I've engaged with a lot of friends and other traders and stuff, and people have gotten pretty insanely rich. Right? I mean, even more so than I remember in 2017, the last, you know, six to seven months, the opportunities have been there, and none of them are particularly happy. But I've talked to, in fact, I've experienced it to some degree myself, you know, what, like you said, once you
Starting point is 00:14:43 get over a certain, certain threshold, it becomes a bit mo' money, mo' problems, you know, as big as big, you said, it really is, because then you have the paranoia of losing it, or how to manage it, or what the tax burden will be. And it just, you know, compounds a lot of big things. So I so interesting to hear you say it, because I think that that will resonate with a lot of people. And I've heard it so many times in the last six months. This circles back to what we were talking about balance. Like, firstly, make sure you have the other areas of your life on point. If you're not fit, if you're not able to be energetic, if your body isn't healthy, obviously, that's going to affect your happiness. There's a strong correlation between your mental health and your physical health. Then taking care of your mental health, meditation will help you. It won't solve any problems, but you'll be aware. Like if you notice you're constantly thinking about this really stressful commitment you have to this one
Starting point is 00:15:38 job, every time you come down, every time you sit down to meditate, that's what's going to come up in your mind. And that's how it helps you solve that. And when it comes to money and happiness, that's why like, once you have that financial freedom, stop pursuing more money, start pursuing doing the things you like to do. Scott, you love this podcast, right? It's so fun. You get paid to talk to interesting people and sometimes people like me, a little less interesting. But yeah, so that's the amazing thing. You love to write your newsletter, find the things you love to do. And it's generic advice, but it's not just about finding things
Starting point is 00:16:16 you love to do. It's about finding things you enjoy and then doing them in a very consistent, capable, productive way while building relationships. It's not just, you can't just do what you like and expect it to produce a result. You need to do it well. You need to do it consistently. Like what number episode is this, Scott? How many episodes have you done one after another? Yeah, I'm over well over a hundred. Honestly, I can't even tell you the number, but I had a conversation with Charlie Shrem and he said, none of it counts till 500. And he's not there yet either. He said, I hear that you can consider a podcast successful once you've gotten to 500 episodes.
Starting point is 00:16:51 Another goal for me as well. A lot of perspective there. So, you know, that's a lot. Yeah, so talking about doing a podcast and a newsletter and having a YouTube channel, right? It's funny, there's the sort of meme attitude in crypto Twitter, certainly that says, if you're a good trader, you shouldn't do YouTube channel, right? It's funny, there's the sort of meme attitude in crypto Twitter, certainly that says, if you're a good trader, you shouldn't do anything else, right? You should only make your money trading. Otherwise, you're a faker, a LARP, or whatever
Starting point is 00:17:13 the catchphrase of the week is. But you were already a successful trader and decided to basically shift gears completely and start taking a very similar path as I did, obviously, like a newsletter, YouTube, podcast, all those things, because it makes a lot of sense. And I know that you think it's fun. But what made you pivot so strongly? Because you could have just kept trading? Well, Scott, you know, you were a huge motivation for that pivot. We had a sit down and a conversation. You very much impacted the course of my life just as you do thousands of other people for your newsletter and podcasts. I was at a point where COVID had just hit. And I don't know if I can say the word COVID. I know
Starting point is 00:17:59 that kills SEO. So that had just hit. And I was doing a lot of work in the property industry and now i had this choice where i'm like hmm could i go 110 just trade do nothing else would that make me happy and the answer was no because i like you i have a bit of an adhd i like to do so many different things at once right now i'm content creating i I'm making like on my YouTube and Twitter. I'm doing the newsletter, the podcast. I'm working as an advisor to several companies in the space. Like I like to do all of it at once. So I thought about, and meditation came in here as well.
Starting point is 00:18:36 What do I want to do next? And how do I want to do it? Do I want to just trade? What impact is that having on the world? What is that really doing that's cool or exciting? Is that going to motivate me forever? It's a fun video game, but it's not enough. Then you presented the opportunity. Hey, wait a second. I've got the audience. A newsletter and a podcast could really help bring awareness and attention to crypto. It could open all sorts of doors in terms of
Starting point is 00:19:01 building relationship capital. I'm sure you've met, made loads of connections, people who just come on the podcast. And I'm like, wow, I can actually build in the crypto space, this thing, which is building new infrastructure that can change the world for the better. That's exciting. That's fun. I want to do this. Monetary wise, like that comes after. I'm sure the money will follow. If I do a good job, the money will come to me. So you and the fact that crypto is an incredible, exciting place to build. And the fact that I didn't just want to trade is why I went here. And I will double down on the people that say, if you just trade, you'll be a better trader. I think they're right. Like if you like, if I wanted to be the absolute best trader, I possibly could be, I drop most other things and just trade. And I have had to trade less. I can't do my intraday scalping like I used to because I'm
Starting point is 00:19:50 just in meetings all day. So yes, it definitely takes an impact, but you can also adapt. Now, this is the key thing. So most people aren't traders. Most people listening to this podcast right now, they'd lose if they tried to intraday scalp every single day. They should be taking passive strategies first. Then they should be learning portfolio management so they know how to manage their wealth and portfolio. Then they can move into like swing trading and taking positions. And then maybe if you like all of that, start building yourself a trading system and looking down that path. But yeah, I guess that'd be my answer to that. Yeah. I mean, we all know that investors outperform traders, like there's been countless studies on all of that. And interestingly,
Starting point is 00:20:34 I've found for myself that, I mean, the less I trade, the more money I make, not saying the less I'm focused on it or the less passionate about it or the less I'm concerned with the system or what kind of trades I take. But I was never good at these intraday scalping thing. It's too spastic for me. And I think that emotions inevitably kicked in for me at some point with something like that. So for me, doing all of these other things actually allows me to care a bit less about the trades, which allows them to reach their full potential. I often say part-time training can be an edge.
Starting point is 00:21:12 It can absolutely be an edge because one, you don't rely on your trading income. If you don't rely on your trading income, you're not attached to the outcome. If you're not attached to the outcome, you're less likely to make emotional decisions because what happens happens. It's just the trade. And if it wins, you're not going to be able to not pay your bills or something. This is what kills me with people who make a little bit of money because of this bull market, and then they quit their job and they jump into full-time trading. Times are going to get tougher. The tides are going to shift, and then it's going to be a whole different ballpark how to trade. And I'd like to bring up something really important you kept saying in that segment, which was me, personally, like, it's such an individual sport
Starting point is 00:21:52 right now, how you trade, no one else can trade like you trade, Scott, you're right now writing a newsletter every single day, you are talking to the most knowledgeable people in the space on a weekly basis, because you're doing this so much, you gain an edge, which the regular person just can't replicate. They can't replicate. So you need to find your own edges, whatever that may be. And the easiest edge, the easiest edge to get is passive trading. Like don't try and time the market, be humble and get exposure. There are other places to find edges, but that is the easiest one for 99% of people. Yeah. Timing the market is better than timing the market. There's no question. There's a reason that most people who have acquired generational
Starting point is 00:22:37 wealth have just dollar cost averaged. Just buy something with the money that you have that you don't need to touch and leave it for a few decades. I'd say there's a case for, you can add a little bit more to it. So at first, just learn why you're doing dollar cost averaging and passiveness. And that's like you said, you're not trying to time the market. You accept with humility
Starting point is 00:23:01 that you don't have the ability to pick the right time to enter. That's step one. Now, if you want to turn that into a little bit more of an edge, start concentrating it a little bit. Instead of dollar cost averaging equally into a whole bunch of assets, maybe you want a little bit more on Bitcoin because Bitcoin is going to the moon. Maybe you want a little bit less in bonds because they haven't performed well in God knows how long. Maybe also another place which people don't talk enough about,
Starting point is 00:23:25 invest in yourself. Be that knowledge, be that building your own business. That's another great place you can invest. It doesn't just have to be to assets. Yeah, absolutely true. So I want to touch on something completely different. I love the tweet that you recently said. You said that your university degree ended up being entirely useless. So I have mixed feelings on that. So I don't think I learned a single useful thing in college, right? I was in school in the late 90s at a time when I think the velocity of information and the internet, you know, it was really at that time, like what you learned your freshman year was irrelevant your senior year. Now I think what you learned the first hour of your freshman year is irrelevant the third hour of your freshman year, right? So it's very different. But the connections and experiences that I had there, I could never
Starting point is 00:24:18 replicate and could never replace. Maybe it was because I was in an Ivy League school. So obviously it was the people that I was surrounded with. But I want to talk about how you said that you found your college degree to be entirely useless. Can you dig further into that? So firstly, that was a bit of a out there tweet to get people talking. Yeah, of course. Sentiment check. Sentiment check. Because you have to make a strong statement and then that stimulates discussion. And then if you notice, I responded to quite a few of the comments discussing with people
Starting point is 00:24:50 because it's a very interesting topic and it's a hot one right now. It's very cool to say university is a scam. University is useless. But as with most issues, it's not black and white. There's two sides to the story. So my tweet for context, the piece of paper is useless.
Starting point is 00:25:09 I have not once presented that piece of paper or the grade I killed myself to get to anyone because I've actually just done my own thing since university and no job I've worked at has asked to see my degree. So that piece of paper was useless. What wasn't useless was a lot of the things you said. The ability to be independent, learning independence in this environment with a lot of other people learning independence. The friends I made, the experiences
Starting point is 00:25:35 I had, those were amazing. Also, the knowledge itself was useful. And there's two parts to this, which I'll get to. So learning mathematics was incredibly useful. It's one of the reasons I'm really good at trading, if I may say so humbly. I have an edge over a lot of people because I intuitively understand probability ratios. When I see a moving average, I know the formulas that go into it. I instinctively know the difference between exponential and normal, and I can extrapolate on basic hypotheses using that underlying understanding of mathematics. So in that sense, it's great. It also makes you smarter because you're just doing this mental gymnastics with all these puzzles and stuff. But I could have done that myself. There's YouTube nowadays. There's Google. I mean've if i can plug my own course one
Starting point is 00:26:25 second i've got a first complete free trading course on youtube right now yeah thank you you could like people will pay for that and it's out there for free and that's just me for every topic you want there is someone out there that has put free information on the internet that you could learn it um most of mit's own lectures you can find online. So did I need to spend that money? No. But at the time, I don't regret it because at the time I didn't have the information. I didn't know that I could learn it all online. I didn't even have the belief in myself to teach myself that skill online. And I'm sure you know as well how important the skill of being able to teach yourself something is. That's the top thing I look in any employee who comes to work for me.
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Starting point is 00:30:22 Well, two parts. Number one, that's how I like to trade. There was a lot much free content you put out? Why do you do that? Well, two parts. Number one, that's how I learned to trade. There was a lot of free content out there. So I thought, heck, in fact, I wasn't even doing free educational content. I was just sharing my trades at the start because the bull market ended in 2017. And no one, I noticed loads of people that were killing it before and now just losing money left, right, and center. And I'm like, wait a second, I'm still making money. Maybe I should post a little bit of this. And that's how I gained my following in the first place. And then the educational content came
Starting point is 00:30:50 because people like the way I explain things. And I love explaining things. I mean, back when I was at school, I used to voluntarily, oh God, this is gonna nerd me out, voluntarily go to the maths club to teach the younger kids and help them with their work because I loved the teaching part of it. It was really fun and gratifying and maths was really fun to me. So similarly, trading's like this video game I love.
Starting point is 00:31:16 So I'm just putting out these video game tutorials that also mix up with my love of maths as well. So that's fantastic. It helps people. And right now, let me take a second to talk about sustainable business models. So back when I first started making money and doing my own businesses, one of the things I was taking advantage of was asymmetry of information. So at university, I knew someone who was selling just kitchenware in Germany at a really cheap price. And I knew people in UK who would buy it at a more expensive price. Now, I can make money off of that so long as they don't know about each other.
Starting point is 00:31:55 So that asymmetry of information, right? But the world is moving in a direction where information is becoming university available for free. So that business model was never going to last. moving in a direction where information is becoming universally available for free. So that business model was never going to last. Like my value was useless there. So sharing information for free positions you with the shift, the global shift, like where the direction the world is moving in right now. So one of the most useful things you can do is make content. Educational content is a great one. Whatever your content is going to be, like freely sharing information,
Starting point is 00:32:30 just aligns you with the direction the world is moving in. That's why I decided to give it out for free instead of selling it. Because sure, I can make, like transparently, that course has now got just on impressions, about 3 million impressions on Twitter alone, just Twitter alone, the YouTube probably doubles or triples that I could have sold that course for a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars and made six, maybe seven figures. But that's short term, isn't it? Because eventually that knowledge is going to be available for free. So I want everything I do, I'm positioning myself for the long term. And by giving the content out for free, that's one of the best ways to position yourself for the long term rather than the short term. And how much of it is just about, I'm doing well, I want to help people. I want to help people. That's why I'm in crypto, because crypto is going to make the world better. That's why I've dedicated myself to this industry as opposed to, I don't know, the oil industry. This one is moving the world in a really amazing direction. And you've spoken about this multiple times. DeFi is changing the infrastructure of the financial system. Sure, I don't think in the next three or four years, we're going to move completely towards DeFi. But in the next 20 years, how much inefficiency
Starting point is 00:33:41 from the centralized system is going to move over to DeFi and how much money is going to be saved and how much good can be done with that money, how much redistribution of wealth is going to occur, how many kids who would have grown up with loads of talent to become bankers will become engineers or scientists or do something creative with their lives. That excites me. That's why I want this founding in the crypto space so I can help build. So what made you realize that? When did you have that aha moment with Bitcoin or crypto in general that this is what you wanted to focus your time on? You could have traded anything. That's a really interesting question because I came in for the tech and I used quotation marks there because I came in the same reason everyone, most people did in 2016, 17. And that's because my friend told me Ethereum is like the next internet. I've just made this much money. You should buy some. I'm like, cool, let's buy some. So I came in and I learned about Ethereum there. Then I started trading and making money through the trading. And then I continued trading for multiple years.
Starting point is 00:34:52 And I'm trying to think what that pivotal moment was, but I think it was more a gradual shift. And it actually came from my trading because one of my friends told me, one of my friends and mentors told me, hey, you need to start focusing more on the fundamentals of these projects. You've just to hold and trade this project, I actually believe in this project. This project is doing a lot of good. This is exciting. And then DeFi started to get popular around the same time. And then NFTs came out, which are also changing the world for the
Starting point is 00:35:35 better, redistributing wealth to artists. So it was a very slow, gradual change when I made the shift to look into fundamentals as well as just the charts. How much of it was triggered by the timing of deciding to do the newsletter, podcast, all those things with COVID? I can say that personally, I had a very similar path to you, although I wasn't in it for the tech at all. I literally just came to trade and make money and then slowly backed into the importance and use case. But I had a lot of light switch moments, but the big one when the generator turned on to power the entire city was when COVID hit. And I saw the insanity of central banks
Starting point is 00:36:15 and the stock market rising and those things. I'm so glad you brought that up because I can take it even a step back from that. When COVID happened, I realized how fragile the world is, how fragile the structures and systems we've built are, and how clueless we all are in terms of, we're just kind of trying to make the world run. No one really understands what's happening. When you're a kid, you look to adults as if everything is in order and perfectly ran. And the more you get involved in the adult world and the underlying structures behind these things, like people look at companies,
Starting point is 00:36:52 big corporations, as just these machines and engines that run, but it's not, it's just a bunch of people getting together and making decisions and doing things. They're not that solid. And what COVID did is reveal that to the greatest degree I'd ever seen. And then obviously, we saw the all the money printing that followed all the terrible economic decisions and the value of Bitcoin just started presenting itself more and more the necessity of it, as well as a lot of other instances, which happened well before that as well, just the hyperinflation across multiple different countries. I mean, in 2017, I had people in Iran, people coming and wanting to buy Bitcoin for 5x market
Starting point is 00:37:39 value for ungodly sums of money as well, simply because it was the only solution. And something like that, you just can't overlook something like that. Yeah, that makes total sense. So that said, now we've seen sort of the institutional interest peaked. I think we've seen at least the beginnings of an awakening from your average person about these topics. Your average person never thought about their money or how the hell is the stock market going up when I can't buy bread and they can't send me a stimulus check or those things. But where do you think we now are sort of in that cycle?
Starting point is 00:38:14 And I'm not talking about Bitcoin price. I'm talking about an awareness cycle of Bitcoin actually reaching its full potential of DeFi starting to come to fruition. And I don't personally believe it will ever replace the banks, but as a second option for people who maybe aren't serviced properly by legacy systems. Well, I had an interesting conversation with Dan Held recently, and this hasn't been released yet, but he highlighted the difference between something you said that that is DeFi and Bitcoin for me.
Starting point is 00:38:47 And he put it so eloquently in the it's apples and oranges. Bitcoin isn't trying to be DeFi. DeFi is this whole other thing. What Bitcoin does is provide this ultimate solution to the store of value problem. And we only need one thing to provide that solution. And Bitcoin could and is currently the leader in becoming that one thing. Yeah, there could be new technology that overtakes it. But for that, just watch the market cap. Like when something's market cap gets equivalent to Bitcoin, go 50% Bitcoin, 50% that if you just want to take a completely passive approach. But that's the problem which Bitcoin solves. DeFi is this whole other thing in my head,
Starting point is 00:39:29 which is in its complete infancy right now. And we've got no idea what's happening. It's the wild, wild west there. Projects are getting hacked for multiple millions of dollars. New ones are getting made every single day. You can get 10,000% APY if you find the right project. So DeFi is just this early stage infant thing that we don't even know the potential it's going to have yet in the world. I mean, like with NFTs coming in as well, getting more popularity, people, the integration between NFTs and DeFi is huge as well. So with that, it's in its infancy. With Bitcoin, people are waking up still slowly because the important thing for that isn't the price to go up. It's education. The government isn't teaching people about financial education because it's not in
Starting point is 00:40:17 their interest. Like people don't know about taxes. People don't know about inflation. People don't know how to invest or buy the right assets because like, why would a government want to teach its citizens not to be middle-class or lower class, just laborers and going through the grind and making the cogs turn and the machine going and keeping the richer rich. It's, it's not in their interest to educate. And that's where I see the delta, like the gap closing, education. People need to realize why Bitcoin matters. People need to know about inflation before they're allowed to graduate.
Starting point is 00:40:54 You shouldn't be allowed to graduate if you don't understand that putting your money in a bank account for 30 years halves its value. That's interesting though, because a lot of people point to the fact that we have minimal financial education, if any, I can definitely tell you that in the United States, I never learned anything in school about finances. But you're one of the first
Starting point is 00:41:14 people who put it out there to me directly that it's deliberate. I don't want to start a conspiracy theory. I agree. I tend to agree. Whether it's passively deliberate or actively deliberate, I think that as you touched on, maybe the more important thing there is not to say that they're actively trying to keep people down, but that there's no incentive for them not to. That's precisely what I think it is. One, there's no incentive for them not to. And and also it's a really okay so this is quite an interesting two-part one that just came in my head so it's very interesting because it's not a hard science monetary policy is bs for the most part like there are so many variables at play here and people are trying to make predictions off of it talib put it read nasim talib he put it really really well um you like you try to weather predictions are really inaccurate right now, right? When it comes to economics, imagine trying to make a weather prediction where every droplet of rain is
Starting point is 00:42:15 individually intelligent. So just the number of variables and connections that increase there. And because of that, maybe we shouldn't be teaching it to kids in any complex way besides telling them, hey, we're pretty sure inflation's a thing. We're pretty sure you don't want to go into debt and you want to develop assets. But when it comes to the complex side of things, that's why Bitcoin is such a good solution
Starting point is 00:42:37 because we no longer have random people making absurd guesses as to whether or not they should print money and we eliminate that problem. So I don't think it's deliberate. longer have random people making absurd guesses as to whether or not they should print money. And we eliminate that problem. So I don't think it's deliberate. I think it's just a whole pile of bad decisions, one after another that have led to it. And now there just really is no incentive to do anything about it. So it's a perpetuation of an existing system. And part of that greater system that we all know is obviously fixed towards the rich. But as you said, I mean, you don't need to teach a high school kid how inflation works,
Starting point is 00:43:12 but they should be able to define inflation. Yeah. Like my money's worth less every year. It's so simple. But when I was a kid, the minimal financial education that we had was you should save your money. You should put your dollars in the bank account. And back then, of course, interest rates were 10 plus percent. So you could gain money, but you were still losing buying power. Your mortgage would also be at 14 or 15 percent. But we didn't understand.
Starting point is 00:43:41 We were just told to save your money, not to buy anything, just save your money. And it couldn't be more inaccurate now. A lot of people are naturally risk averse, Scott, as well. So it may not have even been bad intentioned advice. It feels like the safest thing to do, just hoard a whole bunch of cash and save and make sure you don't spend a lot and cut back on spending rather than increase earning power. People are naturally risk averse. And those who aren't risk averse either end up in the bottom echelon of society or they get to the
Starting point is 00:44:18 top echelon. Because that's what happens when you take on a lot of risk. And when you get to the top, I mean, that information isn't going to trickle back down. And if you stay in the middle and you've consistently stayed happy in the middle, then you're probably going to continue passing on that risk averse knowledge. Yeah, but it seems like it's risk averse, but is there more risk in holding a dollar than in holding a dollar worth of Bitcoin or a dollar worth of stock or a dollar worth of gold or certainly a dollar worth of real estate? Not that you can buy a dollar worth of real estate, but the idea holds. Yes, if you have no emotional control, if you're not reading Scott's newsletter and you don't understand risk management, you don't understand how to trade and invest because
Starting point is 00:45:01 that knowledge isn't freely available. Like if you tell the average person, hey, you should not save cash. What else do I do? They don't know what an index fund is. They don't know what Bitcoin is. That's just drug money. That's what the media tells them it is. So it's that go all circles back to education, that asymmetry of information. We need to get the right information to people because if you don't have the knowledge, it is risky because you need to stick within your circle of competence. So we need to get the right information to people. Because if you don't have the knowledge, it is risky, because you need to stick within your circle of competence. So we need to increase the average person's circle of competence to include more of this. And that's why free financial education is so important. And how much of that comes down to personal responsibility?
Starting point is 00:45:40 Because if you at least have a superficial knowledge that nobody's gonna do it for you, why don't 99% of people go out and learn this and say, hey man, my money is the most important thing that I have. How do I put it to work for me? Because then you have this gap between, is it really the government's fault or is it all of these people who are, call them asleep or risk averse
Starting point is 00:46:01 or whatever you wanna call it? Is it their own fault that they didn't go out there and make it happen? Man, these are really, really deep and large, great questions, Scott, that I do not have the answers to, but I can offer my opinions for. I don't have the answers either. That's why I'm asking you for your opinion, obviously. My opinion would be that the word fault, if we replace that, then I fully agree with you. It's not like it's your fault that you're not doing it, but you can doubt a certain set of cards and you're the only one who can change your life. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not.
Starting point is 00:46:38 You can't control the external circumstances that have gotten you to where you are. So not just with financial, with anything else in life, you should want to take on ownership and personal responsibility, because that is the only thing you can control yourself. Let's leverage your physical health, as an example. Say you're really genetically unfortunate. You have a huge amount of fat cells in your body. So you store up a lot of fat really easily and you get way more hungry than the average person. Like cool. You're probably going to be fatter than the average person. And if you want to change that and you're at risk for say a heart disease and you want to change that, it doesn't matter that you got dealt a bad hand.
Starting point is 00:47:25 You need to actively take action to learn about dining, to learn about exercise and improve that situation. Just like if your financial situation is bad, it may not be your fault. You may have just been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that doesn't matter. You're the only person who can do something about it and change it. So anyone listening, I encourage you to take ownership for whatever situation you're in and do something about it. Don't even think about whether or not it's your fault. Focus entirely on what's in your control. Everything else is a waste of time. So how much does it drive you nuts when you get DMs saying, sir, I followed your trade that you posted on Twitter and now I'm homeless. It's your fault. Right. To some varying degree, as ridiculous as that sounds, I hear that or some variation of that at haven't done a good enough job to communicate to these people to not listen, to not blindly follow me. So I'll take full ownership. I'll take my own advice and take
Starting point is 00:48:34 full ownership that I'll try and do a better job every single time I can. I try to clarify all my videos. Hey guys, do not copy what I am doing. You're never going to be able to do what I'm doing. You're never going to be able to do what Scott's doing. Focus on developing your own systems, your own processes. Don't blindly copy people. I've never met anyone in my life who's built their fortune and supports their family off Twitter calls that they follow or signals groups that they follow. You know, like no one builds a career or generational wealth like that. What you should seek is knowledge, because a short temporary gain, even if you make a few million dollars, that's not going to stay with you for like, that's going to disappear. That is a finite sum of money that if you don't know how to manage is going to go. Money that comes quickly will go quickly as well. What doesn't go is knowledge, useful knowledge that can help you sustain this. And I keep saying sustain this because people need to have more patience, focus on the long term. If it's only a short term solution, then every single time you're going to have to put that same amount of energy in, try to get something out. It runs out. Then you put a whole bunch of energy again, instead of building long-term consistent systems. Like it's taken me a long time to build wealth that most people, some people, like one person was on my podcast and they went from $2,000 to 10 million in six months. That took me way
Starting point is 00:50:02 longer to do, but my game is different. Most people turn 2K to 10 million in six months. That took me way longer to do, but my game is different. Most people turn 2K to 10 million in six months. They're going to lose that in three months. What you want to do is build processes, investment techniques, income generating activities, relationships, and all these things, which will just compound and continually provide you benefit for the rest of your life. That was a bit of a rant, but yeah, focus on the long term, not the short term. It's not a rant at all. And one of the sort of pivotal moments for me, I remember was the first time I read an article about lottery winners and how like, no matter how much they win, like 77, it was somewhere between 70 and 80% of them end up completely broke and fast. It's not like 50 years later, they've, you know, exhausted their wealth.
Starting point is 00:50:46 It's like four years later, they're completely broke in debt and miserable. Do you need to read about how many of your rock star friends, you don't have to mention any names from back in the day who made a killing, who made a fortune are now broke. Right. But at least they were sort of working for it. You know, you think that like this, I mean, I guess logically it's, it's not case, as you just said. But you would think if someone hands you a hundred million dollars, you couldn't spend it if your life depended on it. roosters millions. And basically he was given millions, but to get the bigger fortune, he had to spend every single penny that he was given. And it was like challenging in the movie for him to get rid of every penny. He had to literally have the shirt on his back when he, yeah. So I, you know, in that movie, it was such a challenge for him to spend all the money,
Starting point is 00:51:40 but you see that in reality, you give someone 50 million bucks and they can have nothing. That also circles back to what we were talking about with trading. If you don't have the right mental models, processes and systems in place, if you don't understand that you need to spend relative to your earning and income power, not your current capital, you're always inevitably going to go broke. If you don't know how to manage your risk and you incorrectly proportion your assets, like you go like 90% into some really low cap illiquid altcoin that you managed to find on Uniswap. And that's what got you from a small amount to a big amount. And you keep doing that, eventually it's going to all disappear. Upside is unlimited. Downside is limited. Once you lose that initial sum you had, it's way harder to earn it back. And that's the case with everyone. And the reason I leveraged
Starting point is 00:52:36 some, because it not only happens with lottery winners, but it happens with celebrities as well. Like professional athletes, they have a huge amount of earning power, but it's limited to their athletic career. After that earning power ends, they can't continue spending like that. The smart ones build businesses. They invest in staff around them to manage their wealth. They invest in smart things, thinking long-term, not short-term. So it all really comes down to it. If you have a short-term mindset, your cash is going to be short-term. So it all really comes down to it. If you have a short-term mindset, your cash is going to be short-term. If you have a long-term mindset, you're much more likely to have long-term wealth. So then how much of all the other things that
Starting point is 00:53:15 you've done outside of just trading were about creating those passive income streams, whether completely passive or something, you know, like nobody's going to argue that a newsletter is a passive income stream. It's something you have to work on. There's a lot of work, but it is something that you can have consistently on the side of trading and that continues on. So how much of, you know, being able to maintain your wealth long-term has to do with escaping those short-term thinking and like, I have to make this much money trading this week. I have to make this much in a month. I have to make this much in a year.
Starting point is 00:53:50 And how much of a difference have you seen now setting up all those multiple streams of income? So this took me a long time to realize. And I mentioned it earlier. It's that there's two aspects to this. One, if you want to consistently earn money, you need to be able to solve a problem that needs solving. And I leverage the example of the asymmetric information. The world is moving in a direction where information is going to become freely available. Why am I building a business model
Starting point is 00:54:22 on that? Why don't I freely put out information and make it readily available to people? So I'm shifting to models that can consistently solve a problem to people. Like if my podcast is always going to be good and enjoyable and get great guests on, there's no reason my audience won't continue listening to it, especially if I keep getting better. So that's a stream of income that gets set up that I expect to last a long time. The other part is, so one, solve a real problem, and your income is probably going to continue to last as long as that problem needs solving. Secondly, preservation. So preservation is very separate to income generation. If you put all your money in a bank account, you are investing
Starting point is 00:55:06 in cash. That is a terrible way to preserve your money. But equally, if you put every penny you have in Bitcoin, you are taking on a lot of risks. There's no two ways about it. I don't care how much of a maximalist you are. You are taking on a lot of risk because there's a huge amount of potential upside and there's potential downside as well. So that also could be very difficult for capital preservation. Even if Bitcoin is guaranteed to go to the moon, what if Bitcoin goes through an 80% dip at a time where a family crisis happens and you need to pay a huge amount of medical bills. It doesn't matter how long you want to huddle for, you have to sell at that point. So preservation is the other really important part. And the best way to preserve is to diversify into well-performing assets. So that's
Starting point is 00:55:58 where diversification becomes useful. And there's a whole nother conversation we can have about diversification versus concentration, because diversification isn't good in a binary sense. It's a tool you can use to preserve capital well, but it's not like the be all and end all. I'm sure we both had periods of concentration and those are often what create extremities of wealth. So I want to just flag that up. That's such an important topic because you talked about speaking with Dan Held. I did the same thing. He was an incredible guest on my podcast. But if you're saying that Bitcoin has solidified itself as a store of value, it's important to note that people without value, without money to store don't need a good store
Starting point is 00:56:47 of value. They need cash to pay bills, right? So by that argument, and this is not necessarily how I think, but by that argument, Bitcoin really isn't for anyone. It becomes this thing that's more for wealthy people who are trying to hedge against their cash exposure or things like that, and are trying to accumulate or protect wealth. So to me, I love the argument that it's a great store of value, but I think it's important to note that poor people don't need stores of value. And this is why I love talking to you, Scott, because you have that bipolar mindset. You have the ability to both be stupidly long Bitcoin, as I am, but you also have the ability to know Bitcoin has
Starting point is 00:57:26 its place. And it's not like this religion, you have to join and just say it's perfect for absolutely everything, because it has its limitations and drawbacks. And it absolutely isn't for anyone. So I really have nothing to add, but to agree with you over that. Yeah, I think Bitcoin can be more than that, to be clear. But I'm just saying, if that's the argument, it's fun to cheer the micro strategies and the Teslas and the Michael Saylors and to see and Morgan Stanley's coming in or whatever, but that's not what Bitcoin was made for, right?
Starting point is 00:57:55 So the more that happens, sure, we can cheer because it makes the value of our investment go up. But that actually, to me, sort of puts a gaping hole once again in the income inequality of Bitcoin along with other things. So it's just a bit scary and makes me a bit hesitant. I don't know. Yeah, like with all of these things, there always is another side to them. Even if we leverage the example of DeFi, yeah, we're building great infrastructures that are going to really help close that gap. But right now, the only people who can really make money here are the ones who can afford to pay those absurd gas fees on Ethereum
Starting point is 00:58:32 and move it around. So even this system, it benefits people with a lot of money a lot more than it benefits smaller players. There's caveats to all of this and we're still in the very early stages. Gas fees have destroyed a lot of the income for lower end NFT artists because who can afford to mint or transfer the NFT if you're selling it for 50 bucks? Precisely. Even with artists, I didn't think of that one.
Starting point is 00:58:56 Yeah, no, it's really, it's destroyed a lot of NFT business. People don't realize that. We love to talk about selling something for $69 million. I don't think you care if it costs you $100 in gas to sell that. But if you sold something for 30 bucks and it costs 20, listen, I take crypto payments manually sometimes for my newsletter and someone will be like, it's a $15 a month and the gas fee is 20 bucks. So it does become prohibitive. But I want to talk about something you said you've brought up a few times, which is information asymmetry and being able to take advantage of that. You used the example of
Starting point is 00:59:29 the German cookware and being able to sell it at a higher price in England. That metaphor could be used to describe crypto, right? Because like, isn't it all about, because you could be that middleman for a temporary amount of time until those two people found out. I mean, isn't that just a metaphor for Visa and MasterCard and banks and any toll collector, you know, in the middle that's taking their little piece to be a third party that validates your transaction? Like, why do I need to go to the title agency to sell my car to someone? Why can't I just sell my car to someone and they give me the title, you know, or a mortgage or any of these things? I mean, isn't that what we're here for? Is eliminating that sort of asymmetry
Starting point is 01:00:10 that has long been an opportunity for people, you know, to make money? We almost have to play a guessing game with our careers as to how much market share is going to be taken up by web 3.0, AI, and different types of future developments that are yet to come. Heck, even the machines. I mean, how many manual labor jobs are going to go out to those? And almost as traders and investors and just people deciding what career we want to go to, we have to try predict which ones we think are going to happen the fastest.
Starting point is 01:00:49 And given the current momentum, DeFi looks like a decent bet, like something that's going to happen within our lifetimes and a good place to dedicate a career to. That information asymmetry, or not even information asymmetry, but lack of need for a middleman between these two people is why DeFi is going to fill in a big hole. And if we can take the place of DeFi, man, there's a lot of market share to capture from the banks. One analogy I read, which I absolutely love, it's like the bankers are holding this big block of cheese and then these tiny little mice all around it nibbling away. That's DeFi. Right now, it doesn't look like much,
Starting point is 01:01:25 but eventually that's going to take up a significant portion of that block of cheese. That makes total sense. But then I guess the question becomes for your average person, knowing that we've seen this script played out before, right? I mean, we had the internet boom in the late 90s and 90% of those companies either don't exist
Starting point is 01:01:43 or nearly went to zero and whatever. I mean, DeFi is like that on steroids, right? I mean, I love everything that's happening. I love the innovation. I love the spirit. I'm not saying it's malicious, right? If a thousand companies all have a thousand ideas and they're all passionate about it, I think that's great. But I still think 900 of them will be gone in 10 years or less. It's because ideas are useless, Scott. If we had our conversation in August where you told me, hey, I think you've got the personality and brand to have a great podcast newsletter. And I said, cool, and never did anything with that idea,
Starting point is 01:02:19 nothing would have happened. And the importance of execution, the more experience you have building businesses and working with people, the more you see that execution just matters more than ideas on a disproportionate scale. Because everyone thought of Uber, like everyone thought, hey, what if I got a taxi on my phone? How many people had that idea at a party or just lying in bed and thought of it? Only one person went out and executed it. And there's a hundred different ideas like that. The ones you see and you're like, oh, I'd thought of that before. It doesn't matter if you thought about it. What matters is if you
Starting point is 01:02:52 have the ability to do it because willpower is scarce. Ideas are not scarce. Discipline is scarce. These traits take a certain type of dedication, commitment, and training to develop a lot more than just having a random idea. So in that sense, we can leverage this to look at the current market and assume that it doesn't really matter how good the idea behind your altcoin is. We don't know if it's going to succeed. What happens in a parabolic bull market, like what we have right now, is that people get disconnected from reality and assume execution of ideas. So if you assume execution of the idea, you're going to start investing in just the idea. And that's a really dangerous thing to do, because reality will hit at some point,
Starting point is 01:03:45 and you won't be able to predict when it's going to hit and then most of these projects because there's humans behind these there's regular humans who um have a lot of capacity to not follow through and fail will eventually fail and yeah a couple one like there'll be a there'll be an amazon or two in that like very probable that there will be but you really think you're going to pick the Amazon or two out of that basket. That's why I don't understand people who get religiously married to any investment, have the humility to accept, maybe I don't have the ability to predict six, seven years in the future, whether or not this team are going to be able to execute this world changing idea, because I've read a white paper and watched the YouTube video. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 01:04:28 Yeah, I know. You're 100% right. Half those passionate community members are a result of trades gone bad, let's be honest. But how did my trade go bad? I became an investor. I moved my stop loss down. I'm very passionate about the tech. That's kind of the path of a community member. But no, I think that that's really interesting and important. And it begs the question, then if you want exposure to DeFi, but you don't want to throw darts, so to speak, like, is it do you buy Ethereum? I mean, what's the best way? Do you think for your average person who like thinks, yeah, DeFi is the future, but is likely to go broke before that future is realized if they don't, you know, invest responsibly.
Starting point is 01:05:09 A lot of people like to answer this question with, hey, why don't you go buy a DeFi index? And there are, that is an option. There are loads of DeFi indexes. For those who don't know, a DeFi index is simply a basket containing the best performing, highest market cap DeFi coins in the market right now. The problem with this strategy is we're so early in the market that there's probably going to be a huge turnover in what those top 15 projects are going to be. So that inherently attaches a lot of risk to just picking up and-
Starting point is 01:05:42 If two out of 10 in your basket go to zero, your basket's dead. Exactly. Or if your basket is constantly changing with the top coins, you'd be better off just picking one and trying to get it right. So that's why I don't like the basket approach. Then there's the,
Starting point is 01:05:59 well, why don't I pick an individual coin? And now you're just taking on a ridiculous amount of risk because you're assuming you have the ability to predict the right coin. So the solution becomes, and here we are again, education. Like if you truly want to learn about this new thriving space, do you know how many people have made fortunes just dedicating all their free time? Like if you've got a nine to five, dedicate every evening to learning about this. Spend some time in chat rooms, discords, telegrams, talk to the developers, talk to the people behind these projects, talk to the funds investing in these projects, listen to the right podcasts, and start accumulating that knowledge. If you build the knowledge to make these decisions for
Starting point is 01:06:40 yourself, worst case, you learn about a thriving new space and you might even be able to get a job in it. You know what, Scott, I'm going to pivot my answer to this. That's a better answer. The best way you can get exposure to DeFi is to get immersed in the space. Are you good at making memes? Come make memes for a DeFi company. Attach yourself to the success of that company. Find a way to get involved in the space rather than throwing your money at a random project and hoping you'll be right and spend time learning and educating yourself as well. Such great advice. And I just realized that we're totally probably out of time here. Then I've gone over what we talked about. You have a very busy day. So I love it. I want to ask, where can
Starting point is 01:07:20 everybody follow you? Sign up for the newsletter, listen to the podcast, check out your YouTube, your Twitter. Where can they get the full Karush experience? So Karush AK on Twitter and YouTube. Super simple. Karush AK, Scott, I'm sure there'll be a link somewhere. And then Market Meditations is the newsletter and podcast. Market Meditations, if you search it, it should come up. I'm glad you like the name.
Starting point is 01:07:42 And also just a huge thank you for having me on, Scott. It's been one of my goals to get on this podcast without having to ask you. I hope I didn't ask. He did not ask for the record. This is an invitation. I hope I've delivered value to your listeners. And this was a useful, fun, exciting episode. And I'd love to come on again and have you on the podcast again as well, Scott. To be totally honest, this is like top five conversations I've ever had. It always is when you and I talk, but I think that this is a lot of practical and important knowledge and information that a lot of people who are listening don't get so easily. It's one thing to talk to, you know, the huge names that are building and
Starting point is 01:08:22 the blue checks and all that, But you know, it's generally a more focused on a specific concept. And I think that there's just a lot of actionable knowledge here. And maybe somebody will listen to this and just have a grand awakening and realize, hey, man, I'm just like way too emotional and I need to go hit the gym. And, you know, even if we get that for one person that listens to it, it makes it a worthwhile and an amazing conversation. So thank you very much for taking the time and honor to have you. And we will definitely do it in the future because I feel like we could have done this for another three hours here. For sure, Scott. Again, thanks for having me.

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