Tokenize Everything: Raising Capital Without VCs

A lot of people will be upset about that I say this. The only thing that matters in crypto is price. People will tell you, "Oh, it's about the technology. It's about being a put on the government." But if you ask what actually moves the market, what brought Bitcoin from 1 cent up to $126,000 at the peak.

The tokenization of a startup, I could get money into my company in a different way. I mean, it's revolutionary.

If I was a startup owner and I was like, I'm dead set on on tokenizing it. I would I would think about a few things first.

In the pathway to peak performance, you have to have a passion for being outstanding.

I love talking about crypto. I love teaching people about crypto and I I'm just hope people like it as much as I do.

Aidan Carney Skytt, welcome back to the Pathway to Peak Performance. So good to see you, my friend. It's been a year since I saw you last. A lot has happened. You graduated from college a year early and then you started something new. We're going to talk about it. Before we get going, tell us what your charity is. Last year was something to do with seafaring or something like that, right?

Yeah, it's uh Seasteading Institute. Uh basically making it so that we can build countries on the ocean. I believe that there's a direct correlation between the amount of countries that exist and uh sovereignty around the world. So, I want to see more countries and startup societies and uh I think the Seasteading Institute is a good cause.

Well, you know what? It's good that you're still on it because um we're going to we're going to talk more about it. All right. Uh the show's sponsored by KetoneAid now. So, you're familiar with ketones.

Yeah.

These are the sort of Ferrari of ketones and I think you're going to really dig this.

Yeah.

Uh there are two different We're going to try a couple different things today.

Yeah.

There are two different products we're going to try or we could try. One is KE4. This is for like the people who are really used to. And then there's KE2. It's a little little bit easier on the palate, right? Um so what you're going to do is pick one of the two. Take these two cups, the one that's in the middle closest to you, and you're going to go ahead and put in the capfuls.

Okay.

And then we'll go from there.

Cool. There we go.

All right, my man. Here we go. Bottoms up. Cheers.

Cheers.

Yeah. Not bad, right? Snow.

Good stuff.

All right. So, um uh 4:45. So, we're going to check back in like 20 30 minutes.

Okay.

And see how you feel.

Sweet.

All right. So, you graduated uh a year early from college, which congratulations. That's awesome.

Thank you.

Uh it wasn't like your school was an easy school to graduate from. So, uh you got down there, you got it done. Um cuz I think you were dying to get out there and do some stuff.

Yeah.

Make some stuff happen, which you've been doing all your life, right? You've been doing it since you were a kid. So, we don't need to go back and rehash everything we talked about on the last episode. But the one thing I want to talk to you about is you made a bold prediction last time you were here, my friend, and it was that Bitcoin was going to go to a million dollars a coin.

Yeah.

And in this last year, we had it go and drop basically half of it value.

Yeah.

You did a good job. I want I want to congratulate you on walking that back and sort of like, you know, saying, "Hey, stuff happens." And I think it's great to have an opinion. I I had something happen similar to me. I made a prediction that I don't know how many years ago it was, but I said that um AI agents would take over uh the front desk of all healthcare practices by the end of uh 2026. Getting pretty close to the end of 2026. What I learned along the way is that that's not entirely feasible. The tech is there. The um actual implementation side of it is really where the chokehold is. It exists at the practice level. So you can have the technology ready, but it doesn't mean that people are ready to adopt it.

Which is kind of interesting because when you think about it, there's still so many people that have no idea about crypto or blockchain or anything that's happening with regards to that. And I think it's really interesting as you come back over the top. Not only are you such a true believer in this, you actually just launched a hedge fund that's deep into it. So take me through it, man. Tell me what's happening.

Sure. So I I start by saying that I still stand by my opinion that Bitcoin hits a million dollars within 10 years. Crypto operates on something called the four-year cycle. So that uh is 3 years up, one year down. Last cycle, the end of it was marked by what was called 10/10 October 10th of last year. That was the largest liquidation event in crypto history. $19 billion wiped off the face of the earth. Um, and that put us into the bear market. So, we've since experienced uh almost exactly a year down and uh now we're going back up. I think the bottom's in.

Everyone, if you look at last cycle, I remember right before 10/10, everyone was saying that the top was going to be like December, January, and then it came a little early. Now, everyone was saying that the bottom was going to be this October came a little early. I think that you have two competing forces. On one hand, you have the four-year cycle, which uh given how much proof we have four-year cycle after four-year cycle, it's it's always been aligned. That's a we we can now say that's structural. I I believe that is largely structural.

You think you have enough pattern there to actually say that this is like this is the way it works.

This is that that is that's gospel in crypto. But you have another factor that I think uh all markets optimize for max pain. I think in the instance of crypto in this cycle, what would max pain look like is people waiting for 10 months for crypto bottom. They think they have a few more weeks to accumulate and then crypto bottoms and takes off without them and then they have to FOMO in. That's max pain. So, we're seeing uh Bitcoin is off the lows. Um altcoins have rallied and if you look at the trenches, the super low market cap stock uh which is what my fund is situated around, uh that's already moving like a freight train.

What do you think when you when you think of people's crypto knowledge on a whole? I mean, you're going to speak at a conference in uh Jackson Hole, Jackson, Wyoming. Even though you don't drink, you should go to the cowboy uh Million Dollar Cowboy Bar and have a good time. At least check it out, right? It's so it's an experience for sure. I mean, all of all of Jackson is just so incredible and it's like, you know, hope you can get some fishing in there. But, um, so you're going to go speak at this conference and that's going to be a great opportunity, but like most people just have zero knowledge. I mean like if you if you think about and the crypto community is pretty small still relatively speaking to the general population. What do you think the barriers are to people really understanding this and wanting to participate in this?

There's a few things. One, I think it's uh if you want to invest in it and understand what you're investing in, not be like, oh, I'm I'm just buying with the rest of the people. If you want to, which I think most people who want to make wise investments, they want to know what they're investing in. Uh it reminds me a little bit of the CNBC clip of the they had a they had a hedge fund manager on and uh they bring up the so stock and the stock's doing really well. It was up. I I believe the stock was up and they're like, "Yeah, so what does the stock do?" And then he you could just see like the deer in headlights moment. And then he goes, they're on a Zoom call. He goes, "You're breaking up." Never answered the question.

Yeah, got to go.

So, with crypto, there's you have to spend some time learning about blockchain. You have a lot of pieces. One, I think it's there's a there's a language barrier in the sense of there's a lot of crypto native uh vocabulary that people don't understand. So, if they hear a conversation about crypto, it's very overwhelming. So, it's super easy to spot a fake crypto guy, right? If I talk to a cryp if I talk to someone who said they were like a crypto person five minutes with them because it could be something as simple as when you're trading in the Solana trenches what slippage do you set so you don't get me to me that's a very simple question it's like that's routine

Yeah right

To someone who's not in this world almost every word that I said is sounds like jargon so I think I I've taught a lot of people crypto you know I got into it when I was 12 And I find that it really takes like 20 hours to go from knowing nothing about it to understanding it and understanding why it exists. So I think you have to just take the time to learn. And if I were learning from scratch, I'd be like you start with Bitcoin because that's just like that was the first cryptocurrency. You start with Bitcoin. You have to understand like what is Bitcoin? What is a blockchain? Why does decentralization matter? What is fiat currency? Right? Because you if if you have like a spectrum of like centralized government control to like decentralized permissionless peer-to-peer, right? Those are that's kind of the spectrum of of currency. In order to really understand crypto, you have to understand what the other option the other option is and why a lot of people would say fiat currency is bad.

So, I'd do that. I'd also say uh you should learn about smart contracts. You should you should understand why having programmable money is a net positive, right? That's what that's really the what Ethereum brought to the table is we can have these smart contracts that uh initiate automatically. I mean, you're a business guy. You you you know how much of business is just the world of contracts. Like just being able to put that all on chain, make it permissionless, make it pay out automatically when certain criteria are hit. Like that that's impactful.

The other side of it is people are a little fearful of it, right? You hear a lot about crypto hacks. It's really easy to it's since it's permissionless, right? If you don't know what you're doing, it's really easy to lose your money if you're reckless. But like I I don't want people to be dissuaded by that. I think if you learn about it and you still think that it's too much responsibility to custody your own money, be your own bank, just buy the ETF, right? Get the exposure of uh crypto without the worry about someone draining your crypto wallet.

So, education side of things, um, that, you know, I think there's got to be more of it. And it seems like it's all focused within the crypto community and those, it's almost like knock three times at the door before somebody lets you in, right? You know, it's one of those deals where you got to really want to be in it and you got to really want to understand it. Uh, when you do, then the the world opens up. Um I want to talk about tokenization for businesses because you know for the longest time something I've avoided for many years now um which on all my companies I've just never I have not taken any outside money from venture capitalists.

Sure.

So there there's a reason why and I don't need to get into all that and you know who knows down the road you may need them right. Um but there but there's a new option that is really kind of cool for startups. Uh and we're in the midst of a massive startup uh revolution. I mean it reminds me of back in the day of like the startup world in like 1996, right? That's kind of where I feel like we are right now in the AI world feels almost like you know You've Got Mail AOL, right? So we're in this the whole thing is about to change. We're going to we're going to go into a whole new wave of things. So, you know, we come back to to the crypto side of things. I think what's really interesting is I think this notion of it it takes off. It's going to once people are in it, they're not leaving. How many people do you have that you run into go they they start off I mean unless they do something reckless and crazy. How many of them actually get into crypto and then bail?

I think once you're fully in crypto, it's a world that is hard to leave unless you're forced out, right? Because in the four-year cycle, right, you three you see three years of increasing levels of speculation and then uh in the one year down you see a lot of bodies rise to the surface of people who were overleveraged and they get blown up or their company was built on idealistic view of how people will use blockchains on a consumer level and then people look in the bear market and there's 40 users and the company raised $100 million, right? Those people leave. They're burned.

Yeah.

Crypto attracts financial tourists as well, right? I think most of those financial tourists went over to AI, right? Because that's the new hot shiny thing. Um, but of the people who have been investing in it for multiple cycles, it has some staying power because once you see the returns on crypto, it's hard to go anywhere else.

Well, this brings us back to this point that I wanted, you know, like the tokenization of of a startup, right? The notion of I can get money into my company in a different way.

Yeah.

Which is I mean it's revolutionary, right? It is it is a whole new frontier. And I think the reason why I wanted to ask you like how many people leave uh is sort of like to set the watermark for how many people have been in there, how many people have left and how many people would understand what tokenization is and how that would actually work in a startup because I think that's a lot. I mean to me if I was starting over today and I was like I had a great team and a great idea and we're going to go out and we need to raise money in order to actually build the product. I'm probably going that route. I'm probably going to try that out, seeing what happens. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah. So, to take a step back, what is tokenization? I I think I think people should understand what it is at a high level.

Yeah.

Uh tokenization is essentially uh so you you the words you'll hear a lot are tokenization and real world assets. Uh a lot of people abbreviate real world assets as RWA. And essentially what it is is taking products that aren't uh onchain native. They aren't from the crypto world, right? Like like a business or an apartment building um and putting them on chain. And then since cryptocurrency is infinitely divisible, then rather than having to sell something in a finite amount of shares, uh you can just sell like fractionalized fra fractionalized shares.

And then what you can do is that that opens up the whole uh for for someone who's buying a tokenized asset that opens up this entire market of well now you can uh use that asset as currency right so there's this thing so Kraken which is one of the largest exchanges uh in the US uh they have this offering called xStocks they're tokenized stocks so you can own like Apple or Nvidia or Tesla on chain And that's kind of cool because then I could, you know, if I own Apple stock, I could uh own it on chain and then if I want to pay you for something, I can just send you some a little bit of Apple stock, treat it like currency. And then there's also like decentralized finance. There's all sort of like lending protocols. So then if I had Apple stock, it's just super easy for me to take it uh tokenized Apple stock, stick it in a lending protocol, and borrow against it without having to sell it. Obviously in the US people like that because if you're borrowing against it uh it's not there's no capital gain versus one if you have to sell it uh that's going to trigger capital.

That's one that's one of the best deals going right.

Yeah. So a lot a lot of people like that, right? Or uh there's a company called Ether.fi and they built a card company, credit card company off of uh that exact premise where people can load up their crypto into the account. Um and then instead of selling their Ethereum to pay for stuff, they're borrowing against it. And that allows them to get a line of credit from their Ethereum and then not have to sell it. And if you assume that Ethereum will appreciate at a faster rate than uh the interest rate, then you're basic you're functionally getting a zero interest loan.

Yeah,

It's pretty cool. But to go back to tokenizing startups, the reason someone might do that is essentially so you have this business and uh you could basically take the yield from that business, right? Say say the the profits that you don't plan on reinvesting into the business. Um you could basically take that and put it on the blockchain and say, "Oh, uh people can go and buy that for x amount of dollars." And then uh when they hold that they get airdropped every month, every quarter, every year they get airdropped um a percentage of profit that's associated with the total number of tokens that they hold. So for a business owner, that's an interesting proposition because instead of having to go to the small pool of VCs, you've now opened yourself up to a global market of people who are looking at real world assets on chain.

Yeah. Yeah. And they don't have to be qualified investors to be in that.

I mean, it depends what jurisdiction you're in. And it's kind of the it's kind of the wild west. So, the answer is it depends. But if you looked at uh how people are treating xStocks, for instance, anyone can own xStocks, right? Some random guy in Indonesia can technically own a share of Apple. But the nuance is uh they're not buying voting rights in that company, right? So, uh the guy in Indonesia just wants the financial appreciation. He was never going to buy enough to for his vote to matter. He just wants to be able to have his equity appreciate. So, he doesn't care. But other people, if you're buying much larger, they would they would care.

The other interesting thing about tokenization of real world assets is you could if you think of like an apartment building and all the economic factors that play into an apartment building. It could be like uh the rents, right? We could think of that as like yield. Um it can also be like equity in the building and if it's in a hot market that appreciates and normally as an owner uh like those two things go hand in hand, right? Right? You're like, I own the building and I collect rent. But with tokenization, you could actually create separate tokens for each vehicle. And if you just want to bet on the rents, then you could just buy the token associated with the rent. But if you're like, I actually am not interested in this renting market. I just want to get financial exposure to the appreciation of the actual building, then you could buy the token associated with that. So it it lets you break up the economic exposure across different verticals.

I think it's so fascinating every time I talk to you about it and hear like you know sort of how this stuff works. I think it's super cool and you're in it, man. You are like I mean you've been doing it for so long that as does this really happen if you think about it like you know Bitcoin hits the scene um originally you're 22 now so you're in it uh when it hits right I mean you're probably buying some at that point in time and then there's all this other stuff that happens along the way. What were we talking about? Oh, I guess it was like a year ago was the thing I was asking about.

Oh, we talked a little bit about XRP.

Yeah, XRP. That's what it was. So, I had some friends that were really hot on XRP and thought it was going to really go bananas, but I don't think it's really done much. And I thought there was there was some sort of talk like it was going to become some sort of like international trading or you know, people were going to use it in a certain way and I have lost track of it. But what's happened with XRP?

XRP uh as of recently it rallied. I mean, there was a day when it was up to 40%. Uh,

Wow. So, where is it now? I mean, like when it was up to 40%, where was it at a coin?

Yeah. I mean, it was uh So, backtrack a little bit. Um, 10/10 was the largest liquidation event in history, and that wiped out most all coins. Most altcoins were down 90 something% 95% from their all-time highs.

So, it wasn't long after we saw each other last.

Yeah. Some of those coins never recovered, right? What XRP is unique, what they've done very well is is effectively marketing, right? Because you have these people who are very the they call them like the XRP army and they're very uh bullish on this. A lot of the XRP people are actually from Marin. Um like a lot of the executives live in live in Marin. But to me, all it is is marketing. You know, they say, "Oh, it's going to replace SWIFT." It's like the technology actually isn't great.

But the thing about crypto, and this is what people don't really understand, and a lot of people will be upset about that I say this, the only thing that matters in crypto is price. People will tell you, "Oh, it's about the technology. It's about being a put on the government." It's like I understand both of those arguments and like I think that there's there's merit to those, but if you ask what actually moves the market, what brought Bitcoin from 1 cent up to $126,000 at the peak? People said, "Oh, you know, it's going to be it's it's digital gold. Um, it's going to replace US dollars." None of that actually happened. What causes people to go into Bitcoin and and digital assets is people hear about the price appreciating. They're like, "Oh, I need to get in on this. Why would I make 10% a year on the S&P when I can make 100% a year on Bitcoin" and then it causes this recursive price loop where more people hear about it and then they they want to they want to get in, right?

The only thing that matters in crypto is price. You could have the best technology in the world. If the coin goes down, no one cares. People hate you. In the world, you have no technology, right? Memecoin. Lot of meme coins in the world. The price goes up, people love you. The only thing that matters is price. And I think once you once you see the market for what it is, it allows you to make decisions in a in in a in a more strategic way.

Interesting. All right. So, the process for a startup uh new startup wants to tokenize their their um company. Let's just say it's a tech company. It supplies something um in the health care space and uh it has consumer demand. It's a proven product and um it's ready to go to the next level. How do you tokenize it?

Before I answer that, just quickly on my last on my last statement, I do want to say even though I firmly believe that the only thing that matters is price in the sense that what crypto is is attention valued in dollars, right? Attention valued in dollars.

Attention valued in dollars.

So what when you're trading these markets, the low cap markets, which is which is what I do, right? I'm day trading attention, that doesn't mean that a lot of people would say, "Oh, it's like a lottery, right?" What what what the way I described it, you know, someone who's outside the crypto industry would be like "that's so that's so gross. That's so that there has to be more to it than that. Why would I ever invest in something? The only thing that matters is price." And I think it's a little like uh there are practical use cases for the technology. Eventually, we'll get to a point where the technology reaches product market fit in more categories.

But, uh, the there's this guy named Balaji, and Balaji was an executive at Coinbase. He's a really big crypto guy. And Balaji basically, he he tweeted out a while ago that uh, state infrastructure is funded by lotteries. And it showed how much money states gross from the lottery and how that money goes into infrastructure. And he said uh blockchain infrastructure is funded by the by the crypto casino right it's very it's a very similar premise people are getting into these markets because they could turn $1 into a million dollars but the underlying uh but what what's actually happening is as people speculate the technology becomes more efficient there's more money to spend on infrastructure so many years ago when I got into this it could cost upwards of $100 to make an Ethereum transaction. I want to send you a dollar. I have to spend $100 in fees. Not practical. Today it's 39, right? If we were and that's and if we were using Base, which is an Ethereum layer layer 2, uh it would cost me like quarter of a cent. Right? That even though these markets have been used to speculate, I we can't forget that that speculation has funded all this infrastructure on the back end. That's a long way of saying that I do think I I wanted to I wanted to be clear. I do think that there are practical uses of blockchain. I think tokenization is one of them.

So, with that out of the way, if I was a startup owner and I was like, I'm dead set on on tokenizing, I would I would think about a few things. First one, I would make sure that I have a sufficient amount of attention on my company because you have to consider who will be buying the tokens, right? There are 30,000 new cryptocurrencies that come out every day. So, if you think you can just launch the token and random people around the world are going to buy your product, you're delusional.

What question I have for you there? All right. So, let's let me give you a little more uh context. You got a product, you got users, a token. I mean, you could price it however you like, right? I mean, you don't have to say that. I mean, you could basically say that this token is whatever it is that you want and you can sell it to whoever it is that you want to sell it to. Correct.

If you're launching the token, you can do anything you want with tokenomics.

So, so the the bottom line is if you had let's let's say you had 5,000 doctors using it and then you went back to them and you said, "Hey, I got a great deal for you. You know, you can buy in uh and we're tokenizing our product and you can buy into it." And then the same pharmacy you had on the interest. It's like at some point in time the token value may be high enough that it's actually paying your monthly bill to use the actual product. Is that is that a fair assessment or is that some crazy idea?

Yeah. So if you have a set group of people that you know would purchase the token that eliminates one of your biggest problems which you need you need volume, right? The beauty of tokenization is we're taking an illiquid asset and we're putting it on blockchain rails so it could be liquid, right? We're taking a company that we would either have to raise outside capital or sell to private equity,

Right? And and to sell to private equity, you've got to have numbers. So, I mean, I think you what we're talking about is the guys that are really in that friends and family angel round. Uh, and then going into the the venture rounds and and that's where, you know, you're trying to like at some point in time trying to figure out where you would actually tokenize a product like that. You'd have to have critical mass to some degree, set the token at a certain price that was worth enough money for you to make it worth your while to do that. And then from there, that's good marketing, right? If you had like a certain number of people and you had the right people that were actually marketing your your coin, uh, at that point in time, these people are, they're using it, they're in it, and this thing now has the push to get that upward lift that you're talking about where you're taking it out to the rest of the world to say like this thing's on fire, right?

So, it goes back to the only thing that matters is price. If someone was selling a token and their business was crushing it, but they didn't want to go to the VCs, they need more outside capital to increase their business and uh they know that that outside capital would lead to them making more money. If I was holding a token and I was getting an amazing airdrop every quarter for just for holding the token and that airdrop is funded by their profits. Of course, I'd want to go tell all my friends, hey, you got to get in this. This is amazing. And then since the token supply is finite, uh people would want to get in. The cost that people are willing to part with this uh monthly airdrop increases and then the token price increases and then the underlying holders benefit not only from the airdrop but from the price appreciation. So if you if you had both uh a sufficient number of people willing to buy your token and and trade your token and a business that could create a sufficient amount of profit to make the airdrop lucrative, then there there's a world where the where you could make a tremendous amount of money from tokenizing your business.

It's a pretty interesting idea, right? And it's relatively new, right? This is

Right

Something that's like this is like starting to happen and I think this is just a fascinating time. You're going to go speak at this conference next week. What are you talking about?

Yeah. So, this is the Wyoming Technology Summit and uh I'm essentially we're we're doing we're doing an event where because one one of the things that I do is uh I'm the host of uh the Beluga live stream, you know, live.

You got the 18,000 users on it. You're live the other day.

Yep. So I, you know, I I interview founders, VCs, traders about what they think about what's going on in the market and uh I've been going to the Wyoming Technology Summit um for the last two years. I really I really enjoyed it and uh they asked me to host a crypto side event for them and essentially what we're doing is we're doing a live podcast with an audience. So, I'm having friends from the crypto worlds come to Jackson Hole and uh I'll be doing one-on-one interviews with them and we'll have a group of people watching it. It'll it'll be it'll be cool. So, but finally, we actually do have our our keynote speaker is this guy uh Monty Metzger who's a CEO of LCX, but he also has which is the largest crypto exchange in Liechtenstein. Um but he also wrote a book on uh tokenization uh real world assets specifically he he's he's really focused on the tokenization of resources in one's one's country right tokenizing like the iron ore or gold um precious metals and putting them on chain so uh a a large part of this conversation will actually be on tokenization But outside of that, um, I'm talking to this guy, Anthony Apollo. He runs the Wyoming, uh, stablecoin commission. Wyoming is the first state to launch their own stablecoin. So, I'm going to talk to him about that. Why does this

It's going to be really interesting, right? First of all, the RWA thing is going to be super interesting because I think like the like custody of assets and how that all plays in to tokenization will be really interesting. And then Wyoming launching its own stablecoin is going to be super interesting as well. I'm thinking like I just try to go back to when I was your age and sort of what I was thinking and and I wanted to take on the world and do all sorts of you know wild stuff but the reality is that um you know uh you're in a great place a great time with a great set of um knowledge and I think that's the key right knowledge is not only the education it's also the experience and it's all kind of rolled into this sort of overall ability to see what has been where we are today and what the potential tracks are for the future. So if you think about it like uh you have all this input that comes from the past into the present where you have a narrow sort of thought process on this moment but we also have an eye out to what could happen. It's got to be really exciting for you.

I love talking about crypto. I love teaching people about crypto. I think it's a great opportunity and I'm I'm grateful for all the people I've uh who have agreed to come and speak with me and I I'm I just hope people like it as much as I do.

In the pathway to peak performance, nobody reaches that those types of heights where people are inviting you at a summit like that to actually come speak, lead, interview, whatever, right? Unless like you have to have a passion for being outstanding. And you can't fake it. It either is or it isn't, right? I mean, you just I see it every day. I can tell you just like you can tell somebody who's a crypto trader or not. I can tell you who's, you know, maybe doesn't know everything about what's going on with, you know, how certain things work, but they have a passion for wanting to know. Um, don't need to be right, want to actually get into it and really figure out how to make it work. Then I think what's cool about you is you actually have a passion for what you do. You truly believe in it. And um, it's not like you, you know, like you could go do anything right now, right? If you didn't totally believe in it, you could go do anything you wanted to right now, right? Just graduated from college. Uh you could go work in Wall Street. You could do anything you want, but you're into this. You have a passion for it and your vision for it is pretty big. So, you're not you're not letting up.

Um let me ask you something about how you're working. Um when you have a passion like that, you know, people laugh when you we tell them like, "Yeah, 100 hour work weeks." Like they they thought we were like they're like what are you insane? Like there's no way you worked 100 hour work weeks. I'm like oh no no no we did. Especially when you added in the travel we're into it. Like we're not like it's like it becomes like it's everything. You know you go to the gym you're eating you're working. It's cuz it's what you're into. Um and so the reality is I wonder how many hours a week do you think you're working?

It's hard to say because so if I have to break down sort of what I'm doing, uh I do the podcast once or twice a week, you know, I have to source I have to source guests. Um and then schedule times we have half the conversation normally 45 minutes to an hour and then after that, you know, you have to find clips. You have to work with the clipping team. You have to figure out uh how to get the guests greatest points out out to the world. Since I was on here, actually, I started writing um their newsletter as well. Now, I'm one of the writers on the newsletter. The newsletter has 90,000 subscribers.

That's their Substack or

Yeah, it's called It's called the Beluga Brief. They've had it for a few years now. Um there's another writer named Will. He's extremely talented, but I've started uh writing writing it a few days a week as well. And uh that's just on what's going on in the crypto market. If people want a just one newsletter to learn about what's going on in crypto right now and feel informed, up to date. It's not so cryptocentric, at least language-wise, that uh someone who's not in the industry would be like, "What what is this?" Like we we we we write it in such a way that it's anyone can pick it up and sort of get an idea, but you will you will be the most informed person in your friend group on on crypto if you just read it three times a week.

Yeah. And and what's the character count? How many words are in that?

Yeah. I mean, so basically, uh we do one big topic that we'll we'll talk about and that that's normally pretty time-sensitive. So, for instance, the last one that I wrote on uh Wednesday was about Robinhood launching a uh layer 2 blockchain. And essentially what people are doing is they're pairing um meme meme coins with tokenized stocks and just creating these hilarious conver like combinations. Um, which is just so funny on so many levels because like just a few years ago it was the whole crypto crowd was spending so much money to try to lobby for the fact that these are not securities. These these are something completely different. And now it's like they're literally tying meme coins to securities and people are buying these in such high volume that they're actually pumping the underlying securities.

So, these stocks are are climbing because of the tokens.

Because because of the tokens. And for the record, I love what Robinhood's doing. If you if you want a hot crypto take, Robinhood's layer 2 is going to be the the place this cycle, this this cycle will be defined by uh RWA and tokenization, and Robinhood's the place to do it. It's just it's I I think it's better than Solana. I love what they're doing there. And I I think I Vlad has uh proven recently he is C CEO of Robinhood. He's proven that he's like a crypto guy and he's he's doing what Coinbase could not with their layer 2, right? They had Base they multi-year head start couldn't figure it out. Vlad comes in in a few months. He's done what Coinbase couldn't do in three years.

You think FK gives hungrier users or I mean like what was the what was the what was the win?

He listened to the community. He's really accessible on X. Uh he knows what the crypto people want. Uh and Coinbase had too much red tape so they couldn't move quickly. The crypto community is really clear about what they want largely. They want blockchains that are efficient. They want a place to speculate. They want the they want the rules to be clear. And I I think what what happened with Solana is you got so many people speculating in the Solana trenches, right? Trenches that that's just means like low market cap cryptos. Uh the crypto market, the low if you're if you're trenching, you're you're you're playing around in the really low market cap stuff. Um, and I think that it became so it it was so cheap to launch tokens and there was so much PvP, right? The the incentives were aligned with launch a token and rug it immediately that it really burned a lot of users. The the mar the marginal crypto buyer was like, I don't want to play this game. Yeah, this this game this sucks.

Well, it's too like going back to your attention thing. It's like it's too much too much going on with it.

Yeah. I mean, it's what every crypto dev wants is they want to launch a token that's PvE. So PvP is like is player versus player, right? It's like I make 100 bucks. I took it from somebody else.

PvE is player versus zero.

Yeah. Player versus everyone, right? You want a bunch of people rallying behind like one one cause. And we've seen that just reflected in the market caps of these tokens, we've seen that uh Robinhood has been able to get coins to pump to pawns, which is the launchpad on Robinhood. They they have a token. It's just ran past 700 mil. It was a $3 million market cap a month ago. 3 million to $700 million a month. That's how you know we're back. And they've had multiple hundred million dollar runners and it just hasn't been it hasn't been that long. Whereas Solana the time preference was so much lower that 100k was like top topping for most of these tokens. If you're doing really good if you're doing really good you get a token to top at 100k. Now if you're doing really good on pond's going to go to a billion.

It's crazy. Hey so we are Oh dude we're at that point in time.

I'm feeling it.

You feeling it?

I like it. I I've I've I've noticed uh I feel a little more cognitively aware, right? Um I've spent a lot of time in ketosis because I I used to I used to do a lot of fasting and it's a it's a similar it's a similar feeling obviously.

Yeah. The interesting thing about this is that dietary ketosis mean you definitely feel that clarity and that kind of like energy and you get past you break past those walls and you I mean you've done it way you've gone way deeper than I have. My business partner Jeff has done gone super deep in it. Um I never liked those long fasts but you know some people really get into them and for me this the training side of it was just not it was just not feasible but I've gone as far as like OMAD you know what I mean which is I guess you know light work compared to somebody that's going to do a 36-hour fast or a 60-hour fast or whatever you know whatever the the fasts are those those stages that's beyond me.

I think 16:8 is still the is is the best spot. I kind of just run that almost every day.

Yeah. Um it's not uh quite 16:8 just because I'm going to the gym so early in the morning and when we're done I've just got I have to eat.

Right.

Um but I'm doing things I'm taking some stuff. I mean I take this stuff and it doesn't break your fast. I take some Perfect Aminos that don't break your fast technically.

Yeah.

Right. The bottom line is you know we're not I'm not sitting down and eating a meal.

Right.

But I'm getting the energy and that I need in order to move forward. All right, so now we're going to check out something else. This I think you're going to really dig. This is um these are Hard Ketones. So 3-butanediol, which is like, you know, you think about it. Um it's it's pretty cool because like Yeah. There's so many people that just don't want to drink alcohol. You were just in college, so you've seen it, right? There are a lot of people they start drinking, they drink two drinks, and their inhibitions are gone. They're going to drink a bunch more.

Yeah.

Right. With this, if you try to drink more than two of these, it kind of just shuts off. There isn't a there's no It's sort of like there's no there there.

Oh, yeah.

So, it's kind of interesting. Cheers.

Cheers.

Yeah. See if you like it.

That's good.

It's good. Tastes good, right?

Yeah.

Which is the other benefit. The thing about ketone is that it's the Veech ketone. There's some other ketone like salts and then there's some stuff and they've broken it apart. Um, but this is the true Veech ketone ester. So, interesting story. Um, we were at a conference. Uh, we were at a thing not that long ago. There was the DARPA guy on the space side.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so, this was funded by the research was funded by DARPA and um the NIH and then Oxford University was involved as well. There are two professors. Uh the Veech ketone ester is what this is all about. There's some other products in the market, but there's anything quite like uh KetoneAid. These guys have done a great job with this product. It's been phenomenal. I use it every day without fail. So I've worked it into my protocol and I when I say protocol, it's like I hate to say that, but I've just worked it into my system or routine or whatever you want to call it. But it's really great. So I'll be curious to see what you think. Um you know as you uh as you try some more of it.

I think the 36-hour fast is such a good metaphor for procrastination because when you think about I know I've done a lot of different types of fasting. I was doing 16:8 then I did uh OMAD and I was doing it all for like longevity purposes longevity and cognitive. I think if you the the data is mixed on the longevity, right? Like we know if we feed a mouse 20% less, it'll live for 20% longer. Where it gets complicated is Peter Attia. He was like a leading expert in this for a while and he stopped doing fasting entirely because I think especially as you get older, the goal is to be antifragile. And if you're just fasted all the time and having trouble building muscle, uh, you know, they say like if an old person falls and breaks their hip, they die basically. Like that that is the start of their death, right? They just never recover. So you want to be you want to be antifragile and I think sometimes fasting is not conducive to that. But I think the cognitive benefits are very there. So, for someone like me who's, you know, trying to trade and stay focused, uh, if I really want to be locked in on something, I'll make sure that I don't eat before it.

Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing here is this allows you to be a little metabolically flexible. Um, where you can eat what you need to, but you can get those ketones. And I got to tell you, I mean, like, you know, I'm going to go into a meeting or we're going to go into a planning session or we're going to go into product roadmap meeting, whatever. I'm always going to take some of those, but I really use them in a very pretty strict way. You know, it's pre-training. It's going to be midday, like mid-afternoon, um, as a bridge and then I take a little bit before I go to sleep at night because, you know, that anti-catabolic effect of those and sort of like just it it hits GABA in a way. It kind of takes you into a deeper sleep. So, it's it's pretty cool. And it also blunts appetite. So, I'm not sure if you actually wake up in the middle of the night ever hungry. Do has that ever happened to you?

I'm a pretty solid sleeper.

How hard do you train? Like when you say like I mean, how many days a week are you in the gym?

Yeah. So, I do a few things. I lift. I play basketball. I love basketball. Like to me, pickup basketball, my business partner in the fund, uh, one one of my business partners, Alli Con, we met playing pickup basketball. It's so much fun. Like when I when I think of all the sports in the world, it's like I would there's no sport I'd rather play than basketball.

Well, you've got the height advantage, right? How tall are you?

6'7.

For most guys, you're going to tower over them, right? And when you go to play against How many How many guys that are actually 6'7 in in that you're running into

At Bay Club? Not that many. I'm I'm normally I'm normally the tallest guy, but I always knew I was going to be taller. Um, so I was always practicing post moves and I was not the tallest person.

Your mom's tall?

Yeah.

Yeah. Was your dad tall?

Yeah. He stopped counting at 6'9.

Yeah, that's tall.

Yeah.

Let me ask you, how do you see the world situation impacting crypto on a whole? Because it's not just the United States, right? I mean, this is an international game.

It is. It's I most people don't know uh Pakistan is the third largest crypto market in the world. They're trying to tokenize their entire real estate market right now.

Wow.

Uh I mean understandably, right? It's it's risky to buy real estate almost anywhere in the Middle East. I personally wouldn't want to buy an entire building uh in probably anywhere in the Middle East. But you can convince me to buy a token of you convince me to buy a token of one so I can own, you know, a fraction of an apartment and appreciate on the upside if one of those places becomes the next Dubai.

Yeah. Without getting too personal, um, how diversified are you?

I keep most my money in equities. Uh, I spend most of my time thinking about crypto. So my my philosophy on equities is like set it and forget it, right? Blue blue chip names mostly like tech stuff like that. Um my active portfolio is crypto because I think it's really hard to it's hard enough to track equities, right? It's certainly equally as challenging to track crypto. So I choose to just put most of my attention on crypto.

So when you ask me like how how many hours a day or how many hours a week do you work? It's like, you know, I have the I have the newsletter and uh articles and podcast side, right? And then, you know, we're raising for our fund right now. So, I'm constantly talking to potential LPs. Um, and then our fund is trying uh our goal is within 3 years we want 90% of our trading to be agentic. So today I I work a lot with our AI and data science team to we are trying to establish alpha over the market from the agent perspective. So constantly trying to figure out what that would look like and then obviously uh trading, right? But within all of those baskets, in order for me to have enough context to do any of those jobs, I also have to constantly be following the crypto market and know what's going on and know the latest story.

There's a through line in there, right, that that holds it all together. But, I mean, you're going to get to a spot in time where you're you're going to have a producer for your show, then an executive producer. Uh, things are going to change. You'll always have to do the writing.

I love writing.

I do too. I just think it it brings clarity of thought.

Yeah. And the the thought of there's there's a guy named George. He he started an NFT collection called Boogle. Boogle in the crypto trading world is uh the Bugatti of of NFTs. If you see if you see a guy with a Boogle, you're like, "Oh, wow. He knows what he's doing." If a Boogle buys your coin, you're really excited because that means it's going to go up. U but George is now he's he's he's now basically retired. Um but he has an awesome Substack that I would highly recommend anyone reads. George just put out a piece about how since AI models are writing for people, people are losing their ability to think for themselves.

You know, it's interesting because I think a lot of times there's a couple of different ways that you're either supplying the you the premise and you're basically telling it everything how you want it to be written and you know you're just using it to source primary find primary sources, right? Um you got to know what you're talking about in order to actually do it. But I agree. I think like if you're just letting AI do all the writing for you and you're just sitting back and you're not even like I mean it's great to for research, hey, what's hot right now, but you've got to know kind of what's going on. It's like what you talked about in crypto. If you weren't in it and you just started trying to write about it, it'd be like the guy that you talked about who's like trying to be a crypto guy and you could spot him in five minutes. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Yeah, another great litmus test for crypto is just bridge a token, right? There's a really funny video of a guy on the uh New York Stock Exchange who's uh showing I think they were showing CNBC like, "Oh, we're going to swap to a stablecoin." And he's like showing up in his wallet and he's just having such a hard time with it and he he he swaps it the wrong way. He was supposed to swap Solana into USDC. Accidentally sent USDC into Solana. Um, if something like that is like for a normal crypto person, it's second nature. It's like it's it's like walking. But to someone who's not in the industry like bridging a token um or or just even just swapping a token can be really really challenging.

So I I guess my my other advice to people is like use the blockchain. You can you can read about it. You can read a lot of books on swimming. You don't know how to swim until you jump in the water. You got to use the chain. And the beauty of crypto is you get financially rewarded for just experimenting with new stuff. The way I think what crypto does better than almost any other industry is align marketing incentives with users because the way we market to people is airdrops. We say if you use our product, we will give you free money and the more you use it, the more free money you get. I know a guy got a $3 million Hyperliquid airdrop. They paid him $3 million just for just just for using a perpetuals exchange. So you get reward. So if you see something cool in crypto and you see a lot of people using it, like just experiment with it. Like just connect a wallet and try it out cuz you might be financially rewarded with it or you might find your favorite new crypto product or maybe both.

So some takeaways before we go. Number one, Robinhood.

Mhm.

Beluga in the Substack is is the letter to read or the the note the uh article to read every week, right? You have three of them going out per week, but you have a main main pub, right? Um and then your podcast is is pretty pretty hot right now. Probably about to take off. You've got a fund.

Yes.

That's pretty cool. I remember when I started my first thing, I was like, you know, it's an exciting time, right? You like I would have a hard time. I remember I had to actually um figure out how to sleep at night. There was a point in time where I was like I just I was so excited I couldn't I could barely sleep, right?

Um I experimented with polyphasic sleeping in uh college for that exact reason.

Yeah.

Which is basically where you like break up your sleep cycle. Uh, I wanted to be able to I I at the time I was like insistent on getting up at 4 in the morning. Um, but I uh at first, you know, I would go to bed at 8:00 cuz that was a responsible thing to do. I wanted to get 8 hours of sleep. Then I was like, it's really hard to have a social life in college. You go to bed at 8. So when I was like, okay, I could break up my sleep cycle. And I uh I I read a bunch about polyphasic sleeping. And then I did a non non-reduction one. So, I I still slept eight hours, but I'd go to bed at 10:00, wake up at 4:00, get up, cold plunge, kind of get ready for my day, then I do a 20-minute NSDR just cuz I I think that's pretty restorative. And then at noon, I I scheduled my classes around this. I would nap from noon to 1:30. And there were some social implications and uh you know, you have to be really strict with your sleep cycle, whereas I think if you're doing monophasic sleeping, like you know, if you normally go to bed at 8 and you go to bed at 10, not a big deal. Um for most people most of the time, but with uh it's really easy to get derailed if you're doing the polyphasic thing and you're not super strict. But I will tell you it was probably one of the most productive times of my life.

Well, you know, so I do it all the time and the bottom line is that like there's when you have people continuously contact like it just like the phone is just going nonstop, it's like so it's like I I have I I have to discipline myself and just put it aside like you know what I mean? It's like I've got to spend this particular time. What I've learned to do is allot time to what I'm doing.

Time blocking is huge.

It's just it's critical. You just have to live your life that way. Otherwise, you just can't be successful. It just that's what I've just come to believe. It's just like, you know what? I'm going to give my full attention to this right now. And when people I'm working with people who are not doing that, I'm like, you know, you can do it any way you want, but the bottom line is if you're going to work with me, we're going to do this and we're going to get focused in on this right now. So don't you get off your phone. Let's you get

Multitask is not real.

Yeah. I mean you can only hold one thought in your brain at a time. So the reality is like you set the time aside. You really work on um focusing in that moment. You're you come to it with an agenda. You execute against that agenda. You get as much possibly done as possible. Then you identify what are the things you need to do coming back to that. When are we going to do that? Most people don't live in a deadline driven world. They don't have projects. They don't really like it's nebulous. It's sort of like, oh, we'll kind of get around to it. And then that's where a lot of stuff slips through the cracks in my opinion.

Have you seen the TED talk on the procrastination monkey?

No.

So good. But it talks a lot about that and how like people only do things when there's a deadline and they called that, you know, that's the procrastination monkey who like wakes up and freaks out uh when you have a deadline and then that forces you to do something. But if you you have all these things in your life, all these goals that have no deadlines and they just permanently sit off to the side because there's nothing to wake you up and force you to do it.

I think it's like studying. What I think you want to do is get really organized. Have be really purposeful about what how you're going to spend that time. What are we going to cover? What's important that we c we what's reasonable and what can we actually you know commit to and and say that we're going to finish before we leave. And you know, we can't be disturbed all the time. But yeah, well, it's been awesome to see you as always. And I think, man, I'm just really excited for you. Like, I think this is like a really neat time. And you you've been in it for so long. And now you're at that you're at that jumping off place where, you know, you're you're living like this is soak up every minute of this because it's going to go by quickly. And one day you're gonna go, "Whoa, where did it all go?" It's like hard to even fathom that, you know, when you're your age. It's like hard to even like see that. But it really does happen. And you just go back and you think to yourself, "Oh man, you know, it's amazing. You're living like one of the most exciting times." And they're going to be a few other milestones along the way for you that are going to be amazing and and and incredible. This one is super cool and I know you're going to be wildly successful with your fund. There's that's a given. That's definitely happening. Um, and I think, you know, I I agree with you. I I think things are going to keep getting better and we'll see what happens. So, so let's see you back here in a year.

For those for those who are listening, can I give the 30 second fund sales pitch?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let's hear it.

Yeah. So uh I started the fund with two business partners. It's called 2B Capital. Um it's the uh 2B liquid token fund. Um so we are doing high frequency trading of a low market cap altcoins. So, if you heard what I had to say about crypto and you're like, "This is really interesting and equally as overwhelming" um and you don't have the time to uh follow the crypto market 24/7, uh if you're incred uh feel free to reach out because uh we are happy to burden that responsibility for you. We could we're we're happy to we're happy to take that on. Essentially what we're doing is uh if uh crypto is just money valued in dollars or uh attention valued in dollars uh we are day trading attention. Um we are using AI models to uh trade extremely quickly. Our uh our average hold time is just under 3 minutes. Currently uh it's 90% uh traders uh like myself and we have uh one other trader as a managing partner and then we're bringing in one trader to bring it to manage a book for us. Um within three years uh and then it's currently it says 90% traders 10% uh AI signals within 3 years we believe that will reverse it'll be 90% agentic trading 10% human oversight um these are the most volatile markets in the world and uh the people who have an edge get extremely outsized returns so if you're interested reach out hit me up on social media or email me

Yeah we'll put the um we'll put their contact information in the show notes so that um people can get direct to you um and you're easy to find, right?

Yeah.

Um a simple search will will yield the uh the right result. Well, man, um super pumped for you and I know you're going to have a great conference and all sorts of good stuff's going to come from that. And um we'll see you back here next year. I have a sense that it's going to be a different story and it's going to be tons of fun to hear all about it.

I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for having me on.

Awesome. Great to have you.