🎙 Cooper Turley | Layer Zero

my skill set is knowing everyone and knowing everything about every project and if you try and put me into a box and say that i can only work on this parameter of work it's never gonna work for me because my skill set is being everywhere welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code

because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today i'm talking with cooper turley and cooper and i have a pretty similar timeline for when we got into crypto we were both at the eth denver 2018 conference and that conference was pretty i think impactful for for both of us it's funny that we didn't actually meet there and cooper tells a story of learning how to grind through the bear market and overall learning how to grind inside of the crypto industry and the

fruits that can be born out of grinding and so i think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned here with just getting a grasp over one's mental functioning mental mental abilities cooper is a big fan of of mindfulness and meditation and then using that to just funnel energy into building and just contributing value cooper also tells a story of rather than building something in specific and doubling down on one specific project cooper

spreads himself horizontally over a large number of projects and that's enabled him to be a great connector of many many people and just come to know a lot of people we also get into his move towards la and helping grow and build out the crypto scene in la which is a very unique and different crypto scene than anywhere else that we've seen and very emblematic of where we are with nfts and culture coming into crypto and cooper is definitely leading that uh effort for sure uh so let's go ahead and get right into our conversation with cooper turley we recorded this in person at mediverso

uh so hence the kind of echoey conference room in a hotel so sorry about that uh but i think you guys will enjoy this conversation no matter what so let's go ahead and get right into it but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible arbitram is an ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and nfts over 250 projects have already deployed on arbitram and arbitrom's defy and nft ecosystems are growing rapidly arbitrary increases ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee when interacting with arbitrary you can get

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gone i'm doing well dude we're uh in puerto rico and it's been a fantastic time it has been a fantastic time it's the end of the conference circuit so we're not with a bang here yeah the end of the conference right i mean for 2021 i think so no more conferences in 2021 yeah i got to go back home for for people that are following you around they might think that you work at conferences basically yeah i pretty much do it this way you know i think it's a part of the game it's just being present at all the events that people are at mm-hmm and i think that's something that you are uniquely what your unique contribution to crypto

is like you are the guy that's there yeah you're the guy that's present uh i want to i definitely want to end there but let's just go ahead and do the casual all the way back uh where'd you grow up grew up in philadelphia outside the city i grew up playing a lot of sports a lot of video games i was really into collecting pokemon cards actually and so back in high school i started selling pokemon cards on ebay got a really big knack for music at the time it was really into curation finding early acts finding you know new collections and uh you know i was graduating high school and i kind of wanted to do something new a lot of my friends were going to state schools and getting ready to join a frat and whatnot

but i kind of had this passion for music and sort of creative activities and that brought me out to colorado where i went to school and just got a lot deeper into the music game when you were collecting everyone kind of collected pokemon cards as a kid but with like the other trends or fads or things that you were into was that like you you picked those out yourself you discovered that yourself or was it like things that other people were doing how did you curate your own interests yeah it was a close friend group of mine um me and my friends had a lot of yu-gi-oh cards growing up but i think the unlock for me was realizing you could buy other people's collections on ebay i was like oh it's not only me

and my collection in my basement it's everyone's collection in their basement around the world and a lot of the times people wouldn't think about it they would just wholesale be like i have 10 000 cards they don't want to sort through them uh starts at 99 cents go ahead you know and there was this game to be played of finding the best collection you know knowing which cards were like hidden in that one corner of the photo that were worth like 20 which was a big card and then kind of taking a guess on it and so you would go wholesale buy a whole collection for 400 break it down in its parts have a great reputation on ebay lists each card individually with like name price condition of the card series it's from

and uh just getting to understand the game became really fun because when you're doing it with friends it was very easy to collect it and you know just have a fun time recording it basically so i think people listening to that will be like oh yeah he's an nft guy and you are an nft guy but you were in crypto well before nfts too so i think that's kind of interesting that you have like a very like nft conducive background totally but you got into crypto and before nfts are really what they are today yeah i'd say my first tournament nfts was runescape you know it's a game that i got very good at i had a really awesome inventory out of santa hat i was grinding fishing all the time i had like

billions and billions of gold and was just doing all these fun games that were essentially nfts you know obviously you couldn't export i've never done earned a dollar for my runescape account but that act of kind of grinding and collecting rare items in a digital game was always fascinating to me dude runescape was where i learned farming i farmed the uh like the essence things that you had to turn into spells and like i was like i was a warrior guy but i did so i didn't use any of those stuff but i had to farm that stuff because other people had to buy them yeah and that's kind of what we're seeing now with axiomfinity which is kind of interesting yeah and it's multifaceted i mean runescape you had

combat which you could train you had like you know major you could train you could do prayer and then there's like herb lord and there was obviously fishing and wood cutting and fire making and sort of even like later as the game developed they had like hunter and stuff like that so the cool part about that game is you go so deep into one character's story arc it wasn't just like main objective like play this one storyline and then just like finish the game just infinite you know design space which is what i think we're seeing with nfts where entities is a sector is so big there's so many ways you can go into you go into music nfts you go into photo nfts you can do pfps you know i think

what we're seeing now is regardless of what skills that you have there's really room for you to grow and develop your skills yeah i think people need to be reminded more and more and more that nfts is just a token format like it's just a format like it's up to you like people's like oh yeah i do nfts as in like it's a profile picture nft or an art nfc but like no no no like that's just like what we're talking about entities right now like it goes off in every single direction totally another one that just came to mind for me was uh call of duty and how you can do prestiging and get gold guns yeah i think that's an interesting example of

nfts where it was like play to earn but in like a very like uh social capital type way when you had gold guns it was like you were just legit like they had no financial value you could never trade them or anything like that when you saw someone with the gold gun especially when the games came out you know it was a race to get to that first gold gun i would go to gamestop with my friends at midnight on the release parties and do completely degenerate stuff but i remember such a social experience to be like get the game go home and then you just see who played the most the next day my friends would skip school and then you wake up how are you first prestige just gave me about 24 hours ago you know it was just

a grind to just you know better off your friends and i think that's a lot of what we see in crypto today cooper i think a lot of people will know you as a grinder so when when did you learn to grind was it something that you were born with or like what was your first grinding experience sports 100 my dad was always my coach growing up and so he instilled really hard discipline around like training and work ethic and so starting back as early as uh football you know like fifth grade or something like that my team ended up going to disney world and i was the quarterback of that team and so leading up to that season we were training every single day outside doing sprints and

ladders and whatnot baseball little league i was always going to the bounding cages doing like ground balls pitching workshops you know and then basketball in high school was the main sport that i stuck with and so i'd be shooting in the gym every single day doing two hour sessions got an amazing jump shot you know would do different routines with people on my team and i know i just kind of learned that there's there's time that you put in where other people aren't watching and i think that's what really like develops your skills and makes you go that extra mile and me being able to have that experience from something like competitive sports to be able to take that and go to that next level and really be able to demonstrate that in a

public setting was really fascinating to me because i love this idea of playing with my friends and everyone's like i'm not the most athletic guy you know i'm pretty skinny it's like i'm not super fast like i don't have like great athletic abilities but i just work hard you know and i think what i learned is the harder that you work at a specific skill irregardless of what it is if you put in enough time into it you're gonna get good at it so it just taught me that there's beauty in being bad at something because the more that you work on it you're gonna get better and when you are going through those early steps of learning something it's okay to be terrible at it because you know that so long as you keep putting in time and effort there's a high likelihood you're going to be pretty good at eventually

the pretty good work while no one's watching i really like that line uh what really matters in my mind for people that engage in that sort of behaviors they have to have this internal dialogue because like you people can grind and get good at sports and like if you practice anything you'll get better at it but like if you don't have the internal motivation to do that in the first place like then you're actually not gonna make it right yeah so like you use clearly you can grind and clearly that you're you're talking about um just like again creating a work ethic but why like why do what motivates you do you want do you just like to be

people or you're competitive or just like what's up do you just like performance like why do you why do you grind i want to be the best yeah you know everything that i do yeah i think um i'm really driven by people that care a lot about what they work on and what they do and i think that it's less about beating other people i am competitive in what i do but i think it's about being the best version of myself i think there's something that i'm passionate about i want to perform at the highest ability of whatever that is so like when you're when you're taking uh you know free throws and you you miss a little bit more than average you're like oh i could have done better like i have my own personal record that i could

be that's what you're you're benchmarking to against yourself yeah in high school i was 93 out of 100 free throws i was gonna do three thousand by 190 i'd be really really pissed nice yeah uh was that a property a character that you were just born with characteristic i think that i grew into it i think um you know like going back to the earliest memories i have like playing sports i was always good at like soccer like indoor soccer and stuff like that but i think it wasn't until i started to be like social systems in schools that i kind of formed an identity around being good at sports and that just being part of like my identity i think when i

realized that that was part of my identity i was like if this is gonna be what i'm known for i might as well be good at it and i think from there just kind of developed what i'm really thankful for is in high school you know middle school and early high school was sort of like the installing of grinding but then towards the end of high school i was still practicing every day but i started to have more creative friends coming to my life so the ones that i was playing video games with the ones that i was trading pokemon cards with and eventually going to concerts with and that balance of like during the mornings on in the gym like in middle school i would go to my middle school gym before school started it was like six in the morning i'd be shooting

hoops before school started for 20 minutes and then school would start and i'd go to class sweating and then in high school i would come out of that and um had friends that we could just go to concerts with and just do fun stuff and i think that that balancing act of realizing like okay it's okay to not be grinding all the time and find somebody you're really passionate about and enjoy i think that that was a great way to balance both of those uh both of those lives that i was living at the time do you remember your first like a dopamine hit when you were like we're trying to get into grinding on something and you're like yes that was awesome like [ __ ] yeah i want more of that what was your first moment like that my most

memorable one was hitting a home run in the all-star game in baseball and where it was like in the all-star game too nice like all the best people in the league and just like ripped it cause i was having just a really fun time with my friends you're all there it's very social my friend had a new bat that i never used before and i just like picked it up and i was like this thing's pretty sick you know and then came out and just [ __ ] cranked one like absolutely cranked such an electric feeling i'd say baseball one that had the most memories i remember we were in uh the playoffs one year for districts and we were playing the team that ended up going on to lilly world series it was the year prior to that and they had

their best best pitcher playing and um cranked a home run off of that one of my best friends from high school growing up he was pitching he was this incredible pitcher ended up being the quarterback at harvard and i hit him run off of him and it was just these kind of examples were like i was put in a position where i don't think i was expected to perform as well as i did but then something just happened and like that extra that extra grind you know it was like an incredible pitcher just throwing darts and it was like everyone was striking out and then i just like pray and i'm just like i'm just gonna swing on this one what's gonna happen just knock out of the parking lots like what the hell like this small puny kid just

like banging out home runs like how's it even possible you know like those moments to me were the ones that uh just stuck with me very very much i'm sure there were hours of batting cage time behind that home run huh yeah 100 and it was when no one was there like bless my dad because he would go with me like hours every day and just like allow me to hit as much as i wanted you know buckets and buckets of balls we'd pick them all up run it back again and uh it was just fun you know it's just fun when i'd be able to bring people with me to do it some people like complaining they wouldn't be there and then i think it was good seeing like who really cared like who was my age like 10 to 15 but

wanting to be spending hours of their free time in a summer day going and practicing and getting better rather than just like doing some other stuff and just blowing time off is this genetic at all is this a property of characteristics that your parents have too my dad was a professional tennis player so yeah okay all right so it definitely runs in the family at least a little bit you went to uh you went to college in denver yep yeah what was that like it was fantastic that was my music chapter in my life so like i said end of my high school career i was getting more into music i was captain of my varsity

basketball team but like the whole time i was playing basketball i was also developing a friend group in music so we were going to festivals we were going to shows in the city i was going to see like aviciis zed's dead you know a bunch of these like early edm acts and just having such a fun time like on the side of sports because my sports friends were my sports friends and i had my music friends with my music friends and uh that's why i kind of got more into like my creative self and so we were going to these shows and like talking about like art and you know just music and just kind of getting into a different culture and when i heard about colorado and specifically this venue called red rocks i got really excited about it i went out

to colorado went to a show for an artist named pretty lights just had this awesome awesome experience there and i was like there was none of my friends going to colorado not a single one of my close friends and i was like you know what like i want to change a pace like i don't know what it is but something there just feels right to me and so i just full-on sent it out there and just totally carved out this new identity for myself around music and sort of being in that scene uh how did sports come with you to college or did you kind of just you know do it as a on the side as a hobby just as a hobby i would go to the rec center in bowl and uh my rec team won like one of the championships and i

was just so good my freshman year of college because i kept growing i was like six six foot six foot and one six with two my senior year of you're still growing in college yeah i got to be like six five my freshman year of college and so i was off the backboard dunks like just like doing insane stuff you know and so like when i play rec with like everyone there was super super fun uh what did you go to what did you major in i majored in music business i started in accounting my mom's an accountant and i loved um math like i think it's very fascinating to me so accounting was something that i was very purposefully inspired by like it seemed

like a great career choice you know obviously cpa that pays well it's a very stable career and so i started out in the business school in colorado boulder as i spent a couple years there i kind of realized like i'm way more driven by this creative side of my life and so i ended up transferring to music business degree which i graduated with from denver what year what was the year that you swapped majors i'd say my sophomore junior year probably my junior year yeah cause i remember the first two year um got really into smoking weed got my med card and just got very into that world like i had an operation with my friends and we were learning how to grow and stuff like that and then i was going to

shows on the side and just like very much in this like hippie crypt or you know like weed world that was like all this colorado vibe and so um it took me a year to really find like balance in that because i came fresh out of like varsity basketball team like grind every day like pretty straight edge didn't really do that much stuff to like go to colorado like smoking weed every day and like i am completely sober now i don't do any drugs i don't drink but that period of my life it was like every day and it was very social experience i think that was the takeaway from it is like i was meeting so many new people i kind of came to this new school and i realized no one knows anyone this is all

blank slate like how do i meet the most people possible i was like oh wait everyone in colorado loves to smoke weed and so i got my med car and just became the guy to hang out with and he wanted to smoke and so they'd have like 10 people come to my house we'd do these like big circles had like this volcano vape and just go like super deep on like all this stuff and like great i don't remember 99 of what those conversations were but i think a lot of my social skills that i have today and being able to meet new people are largely attributed to me being comfortable going into new environments and just completely chilling out with people i'd never met before on a very deep level interesting how did you get your grind

fix if you kind of uh put sports not not completely down but kind of de-prioritize sports did your grind grind fix go somewhere else yeah it definitely did i think um i think my grind fix at that time was just meeting as many people as possible and becoming one with myself spiritually i got into meditation at the time i started to meet a lot more people i started to think a lot more about like myself and my standing in the world and whereas my grind phase in high school was very much i want to be the best at this specific sport my grind phase in college was like i want to be the best version of myself and so i would wake up

every morning feeling fantastic i was practicing meditation i was doing a lot of hikes and getting out into the wilderness i was stargazing and going to see shooting stars and stuff like that and i think i just got to see a lot more of the world from that side of things whereas like physically i performed well in my life at one point spiritually i want to work on myself i want to understand what it means to be one in touch with myself like understand my feelings understand how to connect with other people and just get to have a better relationship with myself in the world was this something that you felt was lacking or was it something that you just wanted to optimize for regardless i

think everyone's lacking it you know i think that it takes a very specific type of focus to recognize that spirituality is important in your life and granted that does come from a place of often taking drugs to get to that point but i think that for a lot of people they're not very awake you know like i think they go about their day-to-day but they're not in touch with how they feel about themselves and how they think they just are on autopilot all the time and that point in my life was like i want to understand why i'm thinking the way that i am and i want to understand why i'm feeling the way i am and i want to understand why things set me off in the way that they do and through that process i just got to a point of being very comfortable with who

i was and through that i was able to just make a lot of friends because i had this very vibrant energy to myself and was very excited about sharing that with the world interesting um so having a goal of just being in tune with yourself is is fantastic but also it's kind of that's kind of like having a goal of being happy you can't actually have the goal to be happy you can't go straight for happiness you have to like enjoy the guitar and then get good at the guitar and the guitar makes you happy so after after the plan was to become closer to yourself

what was that was that a means to an end for something or was there anything else at the time that you were thinking about while you were on a search to understand coop i think that's a great way of putting it i don't think i was striving to be happy i was aiming to be present and by being present i was often very happy you know especially going to these shows i developed a crew of people that were always going to the same concerts and i would see them at these shows and i would go and dance for like hours on end and have really intimate connections with the artists and the musicians and started to really understand their career and the culture behind it and i think my you know as i said earlier in the conversation i want to be the best at what i do and at that point in time it

was music as a topic and music as a topic meant finding the best artist early on in their career and so for me going to five concerts a week and getting to know everyone in that scene and all the up and coming artists that was my end state it's like i want to be able to find all the best music as soon as possible and be known as the guy that always says the best taste of music how has focusing on um just identifying yourself for your own personal understanding of who you are how has that impacted how you um uh meet and understand other people it's taught me a lot of empathy you know i think i'm able to just like really connect with anyone on a very deep level

i love the saying you should treat the ceo the same way that you treat the janitor so regardless of who i'm talking to whether or not someone offered to me i want to be very present in those conversations when people are acting in certain ways or as i'm building longer relationships it's allowed me to just really see them for who they are very quickly and so as i'm making decisions about how to spend time with them or products to work on i think i'm able to delegate focus and attention very well because i understand kind of what drives people and sort of what they're good at and what they might need some help with i'm gonna how what about concentration how's concentration with you how's that look like

it's amazing honestly i mean meditation is literally the reason why i'm able to stay so focused on what i do um started about five years ago i've missed five days over the course of five years i meditate twice a day at this point and that pair of sobriety i feel more focused than i ever have in my life uh what's how long what's the meditation look like for you 20 minutes sitting on a pillow just thinking yeah basically lack of thinking yeah lack of thinking thinking about thinking i think is the way to put it metacognition yeah i would say around 10 to 15 minutes is where it generally ends up i have a playlist called peaceful meditation on spotify throw that on shuffle sit there and just

kind of feel myself you know think about the thoughts that i'm thinking about think about um what i have on the plate for that day often think about a pretty good tweet if i'm being honest the tweet's always gone yeah it's actually funny most of my meditations these days i'll have one kind of core topic that's like in my head and throughout the course of meditation i'll have like the crafted words in place that i come out of it and just bang and just rip it right away but more generally i would say yeah the goal of it is just to recognize that i'm thinking and recognize that i need to just be centered in my thoughts and so even if i am having thoughts whatever they are it's okay to have those and

just make sure it's coming from a point of like relaxation you know concentration and sort of like self-fulfillment and from there i think i'm able to operate at a pretty high level i want the listeners to notice that cooper speaks quickly and never really ums or oz and never pauses to think and is very surgical in what he says and i'm going to go ahead and guess that this is a result of that 110 yeah so when you were a kid before you were meditating was were you not able to speak in this fashion i think i've gotten better at it through practice you know doing these podcasts

and writing helped me a lot with that you know writing really helped me distill my thoughts into very clear and concise thoughts and as i've started to go from writing to speaking i think those two things are directly correlated but i would say more broadly you know my uh my meditation has been the focal point for everything that i've done in my career so far you know i know it's a really small thing to pick up but i'm a very big fan of this book called atomic habits that talks about instilling very very powerful habits in your life and even before i read that book this was five years ago the fact that i found meditation as a focus for me to do every single day regardless of where i am in

the world i've traveled so many places in the world and even if i'm at a hostel with 30 people i will make sure the very first thing i do after i get a shower in the morning it's papa medi you know get in there for 10 to 15 minutes yeah get focused you guys all my friends i've traveled with they're like all right you ready to go for that i'm like no no i got it i gotta give my meditation and it's like a thing and if i don't have one you could start to see if i get a tiny bit neurotic and so i'm like yeah i need to need to have this every single day in my life okay so every morning after you shower you one one bed yep one bed and then another one later in the day yeah later at night so basically my call every day looks like waking up

getting a shower meditating and then doing calls from about let's call it 9 30 until six basically 30 minutes back to back maybe a gap in between as i start to notice that i'm slipping a little bit my mental focus i won't generally grab a bite to eat something really really light like a smoothie or an acetate bowl as i'm sure you've seen them all yeah and then uh meditating get into deep work you know i think that second shift is really important because i think for a lot of us we tap out around that like five to six hour and then we just kind of go do something else during the night but i see that second shift as the time to really like go that extra mile and so for me i don't

spend it talking to people on back-to-back calls that's when i do my deep work so i do my writing i do a lot of the project management i do a lot of governance i do a lot of things that are digital first so like being in discords and stuff like that i really try and separate my time from active interactions and talks to more like deep work kind of text-based work and anything that is on the computer when did you get into crypto 2017 yeah and you were in college at the time right yeah i was going through my senior of college one of my professors had a class about future music and he started talking about something called smart contracts and at this point i

don't know why the hell this was in the itinerary i don't know why i was talking about it but he was like yeah there's this cool stuff for the listeners that don't know music royalty system is very long right now if i play your track on spotify today you're gonna see a third of a penny in six months from now and so when he talked to me about this technology where you got paid in real time directly to the artist with no middlemen in the middle made a lot of sense to me you know i had been exposed to bitcoin earlier on from like different stuff on the internet we'll say and um you know this was a way for me to advance that thinking to something more practical and so as i started to

look into this thing of crypto i saw a new shiny object to curate same way that i saw pokemon cards same way that i saw music i was like crypto here's a new sector not a lot of people are talking about it there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of different information to shuffle through when i see that as a surface area i get really excited about it and so i started from a lens of like music got me curious about this but very quickly i was reading every white paper that there was for every project i was on ico drops every single day and just fully in the mix and it was a game it was a culture and i think online you could find that people were just really excited about finding the next hot

project i think the thing that really clicked for me is unlike runescape or unlike you know music where there was social capital associated with it there was real financial value to be earned here and so that curation could go a level above where you could actually make real value and real money off of the creation that you did i think that's why i just ended up diving in so fast becoming so consumed with it so quickly so after you realize that there's something here with crypto a lot of people come into crypto and they're like oh i can make a bunch of money um some people move on from that and then they think about other things but most people start there is that where you were you were at the very like genesis of your

cryptocurrency number really really high yeah i think um i was graduating college i had a music business degree that degree was setting me up to go into tour marketing or something that felt very you know maniacal like i was basically just a human putting things in a spreadsheet and i never was excited by that i was doing some artist manager on the side but it wasn't really paying a lot of money and so i was picking up a lot of odd jobs on the side i was doing uber driving for a long time i would drive friday and saturday night nine to twelve nine to two a.m because those were the best times to drive you would have high surge rates and i could make a lot of money i was picking up uh

delivery driving um hot hours so instead of it being like you know just doordash during the day there was an app that allowed you to go work at different restaurants for one to two hour intervals for 15 hours plus tip and so i was making like fifty dollars then i would hop on uber and i kind of had a goal at some point just to make like a hundred dollars a day so like i can make a hundred dollars a day that i can make this much a year and then i'll be you know set off and when i came out of college i was like okay i'm making hundred dollars a day this is great but like what am i doing there's no upside here like i'm just kind of driving and like what is the end goal of this work that i'm doing and there was no ladder

to climb really so when i saw crypto i saw two things i saw one a way for me to just get the number of my bank account up first and foremost it was the best way for me to make money and be practical with my time and two there was an infinite design space i was like i don't know what this is going to net out at but i am 100 confident that spending my time in crypto over delivery driving is going to net out in a better result do you have a 2017 like token that you just like have a place in your heart for lots of them yeah yeah lots of lots of icos lots of the neo icos they did really good on eo yeah yeah that's funny yeah so i was

doing a lot of the asian exchanges and just like kind of going about in these weird directions trying to think like there was one called like red pulse i just remember there was like a peak point in 2017 where there was like three days in a row where i just had huge bags of the top gainers on coin market cap like consistently for four days and i was like i'm gonna go you know it's game over okay like what's up did you get in um i want to say like june 2017. okay we got we got it at the same time that's pretty funny uh dude was there wait was it crypto that really resonated with you or was it one

specific part about crypto was it like for me for me i got pulled into ethereum like pretty damn quick yeah was there any sort of like thesis or theory or just culture about crypto that you're like oh yeah this is my tribe or this is what i believe i wrestle with that i didn't find ethereum really until 2018 i was using it to do icos but it actually was something that i came into pretty late because i was doing bitcoin first then i was on bitrax and then i started doing icos when i started doing icos you need to have meta masks with ether but for the longest time i was like i understand why people would want ether if it's just used to buy things other coins i was like i don't really get this

and um winning the 2018 but i do remember very vividly during ico culture i love the telegram chats i don't know if anyone remembers like ico days of telegram chats my favorite thing ever would be when an ico would drop and it would be like one of the most popular ones and so the telegram chat like the thing would break and then it was just full-on like the most insane messages you've ever seen like thousands and thousands for a second you couldn't beat it so there's all this profane stuff in there it was really messed up but it was like just that idea of there being such a concentration of power and energy on the internet and one specific chat was

like so exciting to me i was like there is such a community here around this idea of just making money on the internet any of these projects are complete dog [ __ ] which most of them were the fact that all of us are just mobilizing to different like little pockets of the internet consistently was the funnest thing in the world to make did you how did that did you start like changing what you wanted your career to be like how did you know that like oh yeah i want to do this crypto thing professionally for my for my job or at that time was it more just like oh yeah these are fun tokens and fun memes i think when uh the run-up happened in 2017 i saw my net worth skyrocket from