146 - Tim Ferriss on NFTs and 'Cockpunch'

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Tim Ferris is on the podcast. He's an award-winning writer, podcaster with almost a billion downloads and a life hacker. He's here to give us his perspective on crypto, NFTs, and also to drop some alpha on his newest project, a project that very much involves crypto. And I think, so does David, is going to take the world by storm. A few things to look for in this episode. Number one, is Tim all in on crypto now? We ask him that question. What does he think of crypto? Tim has an interesting perspective as both an insider in the space and an outsider. A little bit of both. Number two, Tim's been head down, full-time, on a secret NFT project for the last year or so. And it's got a bizarre name. What's this project about? When is it going to launch? Why has he spent the yeah last year of his life on this project? We're going to talk about that in the project itself, which has a really cool approach. I don't think we've seen in crypto so far. And number three, it turns out Tim Ferris had some money on FTX. David and I asked him some questions toward the end of the episode about how to cope, how to deal with that type of loss, and uh how he moves on moving forward. Some excellent advice at the end of this episode. So make sure you stay tuned for that. David, without revealing too much about the NFT project, we'll leave that for Tim.

What should listeners know going to this episode?

I think cr listeners should really pay attention to why Tim feels motivated to do an NFT project and what about NFTs has captured Tim's mind. And what the thing I'm really happy about is that what we're seeing here is NFTs, the technology.

Unlocking some like creative energy out of a huge, like high performance individual. And listeners should know going into this episode that Tim has found a way to express himself as a creative individual and he's using, of his own volition, NFTs to get that done. This isn't some like, this isn't this is not your typical NFT drop. This is not Tim coming in and doing an NFT PFP thing. He has created an whole entire universe and he's using NFTs as a technology to get that done. So I think this is going to be an interesting just like uh unpacking of somebody using NFTs to just do something that they want to do. Uh and so that being the context, I think people might appreciate what he's up to in this NFT world uh further on into the show. We spent about 45 minutes, the first 45 minutes of the show, circling the NFT project that shall not be named, uh just getting context and getting Tim's history. Uh, but then at some point we just explicitly say, hey Tim, okay, what are the details? At that moment in time, if you have kids or uh other sensitive ears on the show, they you might suggest skipping over that part because, uh, as you can tell from the title of this episode, uh, it's not entirely appropriate. But uh I had a fun time, and it's and Ryan and I were laughing our butts off, uh, and so you probably will too.

And of course, David and I give our full insights into the episode in an episode after the episode we call the debrief, which is available for premium bankless subscribers. If you are a premium bankless subscriber, you can access that on the premium RSS feed. If you're not, click a link in the show notes, become one, and get access to that RSS feed. It's all sorts of goodies for you.

Sure, we're gonna be saying some uh bad words on the debrief this as well.

All right, guys, we're gonna get right to the episode with Tim Ferris. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless Nation, I could not be more excited about this conversation we're about to have with Tim Ferris. Tim is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, uh award-winning podcaster with over 900 million downloads. That's creeping up to a billion. Uh, Bankless has some work to do to catch up, David. And he's also a prolific angel investor. Uh, he's on the cusp of talking about a secret NFT project. Doing a drop here. Didn't know he was a crypto guy, but maybe he is. We're gonna discuss that and what he has planned for this drop. Tim, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing, man?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here.

Uh, we are thrilled to have you too. So um b both Dave and I were just talking. I think you got him into cooking. Um, I think you got me into like the four-hour workweek lifestyle. Like there can be something outside of the the grind that society prescribes to you. So uh we appreciate you. Thanks.

Oh well, I appreciate you guys, man. Without readers, I'm not here. So I really appreciate it.

Uh, so I want to start with this question. Maybe it's on people's mind um as they're going at this episode on Bankless with Tim Ferris. Wait, is Tim a crypto guy now? I don't know. Like, I don't know that you have to be, but there's some kind of tribe affiliation, I guess. But describe your relationship with with crypto. Are you a crypto guy?

I mean, there are some very technical, very

deep experts in crypto. So I would say I'll put it this way I began

I began acquiring crypto in late 2012, early 2013. So I have been, I suppose, on the playing field for a decent stretch of time and continued to be engaged.

pretty heavily

uh all the way through the let's just call it 2017 excitement, uh 2015 to 17 excitement, and have stayed in. And then on the

Art side, I have been engaged, very deeply engaged with art, broadly speaking, since I was a kid. I wanted to be a comic book penciler for about a decade and actually got paid as an illustrator through part of college, worked in various illustration and graphic design capacities all the way through college. Digital art entered the scene for me when I moved to Silica Valley and was trying to support a number of

Digital comic book startups. The tech wasn't quite there, but I collected comic books as a kid and still have all of my thousands of comic books polybagged and backed to this day. Digital art as we're talking about it, probably entered the scene for me early 2021. And I owe Kevin Rose thanks for that. Also, Katie Hahn. So Katie Hahn

had uh a tutorial for me on my podcast, and then simultaneously Kevin started talking to me about.

I guess suppose some of the early days with respect to NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. And then things went from there. So I have collected and I've been engaged with crypto and blockchain since late 2012, early 2013.

So so what Ryan was trying to do right there, and what I want to continue to do is uh everyone in crypto has kind of their archetype, their their category. So if uh I'm I'm getting a sense of that, like not necessarily a crypto guy, but as soon as NFTs came on the scene, NFTs perhaps resonated with you a lot more. And that's really what we saw out of 2021 is uh NFTs as a technology arrived, and all of a sudden it brought in a lot more people. Uh, and it sounds like that it brought you in um in that in that particular uh because of NFTs. Is that is that right?

I it did. I would say NFTs were of interest to me, and the technology layers were of interest to me.

And uh so I've been engaged with that. And Kevin and I always test, I shouldn't say always, but frequently test early tech. And what interested me about NFTs was number one, I could see it being a huge catalyst for

both established artists and would be artists to generate a lot of art and do a lot of experiments. So that was extremely exciting to me. Number two,

JPEGs,

pretty JPEGs, are a very easy gateway drug and onboarding ramp to get normies.

Involved with blockchain technologies without bludgeoning them with really, really difficult technical details. So I saw it also as an easy way to open the end of the funnel

to get more people who are non technical muggles like myself involved with all these technologies. So that is that was the primary

interest, I suppose. Those were the converging lines that pulled me in.

So with inside of the NFT world, there's also like two kinds of people, right? There are some people who are like bullish on NFTs because of like the broad general potential that it has to like change a lot of the monetization model of the internet. It's like an investable category, it's an investable industry. And then there's other people who are like uh actual artists who just see NFTs as a way to like monetize their art, it's just a tool for them to enable them to do the things that they do. Uh, do you resonate with one out of one persona more than the other?

I would say I'm a boundary walker here. And that may come up later. There's a great book called Uh Trickster Makes This World or Makes The World by Lewis Hyde, that I highly suggest to people. But talks about these trickster archetypes, coyote, raven, etc., as boundary walkers, right? And I identify with that on a whole lot of levels, and here that's also the case. So I am interested in NFT's.

Broadly speaking, right? Could they replace car titles? Could they replace, let's just say, shipping around various collectibles, whereby you could have, I'm making this up, but a wine collection that is enormous, that is stored in one place, and people can buy and sell and trade these items using NFTs in a verifiable way,

including all of the possibilities for primary and then secondary sales slash royalties and so on.

I am

Also bullish on the artistic side if

secondaries and royalties can be sustained. If there's a race to the bottom, and I understand the marketplace dynamics and the economic incentives and market share drivers that apply pressure downward on all these things,

then the artists disappear. That's just a foregone conclusion. So uh I would say TBD on that, but I'm I'm interested in both for sure.

What's what's really interesting, Tim, about your story so far is it's kind of similar to Kevin's, right? It's like when we we've talked to Kevin on the podcast a couple of times. This is Kevin Rose, of course. Um, you know, he's talked about I've been in crypto for a while, like, but I didn't really, I mean, it was okay, it was cool, I respect the technology, but I wasn't one of the the money crypto type people. Like, I was interested in Bitcoin, but like the use case didn't really appeal to me. Why? Because I have a bank account and like it kind of works okay, and I don't

Still pretty hard to buy coffee with Bitcoin.

Right, you still can't do that. And so it for him, uh, you know, I think you said before, even though he was sort of, you know, uh in in from the very beginnings, it didn't capture his attention. He didn't get go fully down the rabbit hole. For for like David and myself, it's probably a little different in that um we're very excited about like the money application of crypto, but even more broadly, we think of this as like it's digital property rights for the internet.

Exactly.

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

Well, what I was gonna say is that I've dabbled in DeFi, for instance, and I'm very fascinated by it, but it's not

a core area of expertise for me. Finance to begin with, financial instruments, derivatives, etc., are not a core competency of mine. I mean, I'm not completely financially illiterate, but I am not a finance

person. And

Therefore, I tended to stay on the edges of that. I did experiment and I've used my own money, but

I didn't go whole hog. I didn't feel confident enough to do that. Whereas NFTs,

and more broadly, and we'll talk about this probably, but once you start to expand and look at the potential of, say, storytelling and

Having various layers that intertwine, one layer of which, or one component of which is artwork. Then we start to get very quickly into a Venn diagram of overlapping strengths and core competencies of mine. And that

I think is what has kept me up so many sleepless nights with harebrained ideas. I think some amazing ideas. I just can't fucking sleep. That's what's been the story of the last.

I don't know. Let's call it nine to twelve months. And I would just wake up in the middle of the night laughing. And I would have to, you know, at the time turn to my girlfriend and uh just say, she'd be like, what are you laughing about? And I'd be like, you know what I'm laughing about. And she'd be like, oh God, here we go. Once again. And uh that's exciting to me, right? There's bad insomnia.

And I suppose any insomnia, if it's night after night after night, ultimately gets bad. But there's bad insomnia where it's stress, anxiety. And then for me, there's this physiological quickening that is good insomnia, where you just can't stop the ideas from coming related to some project you're really excited about.

Yeah, it sounds like you got bit by the bug.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's I got I got bitten by the bug, and I also had a number of bugs from Christmas past, meaning these latent passions that I have had for a very, very long time that also woke up and bit me in the ass in a good way.

That's uh yeah, that's really cool. I uh uh another piece of this, because I know you've had um many people from crypto on on your podcast before, right? So you've had uh Katie Hahn you mentioned, right? I think you did an episode with um uh Chris Dixon and maybe it was um

Also, also people like Vitalik has been on.

Vitalik if so so you you've definitely uh heard the crypto perspective uh for a long time, but this is the thing that got you in. I'm I'm also kind of looking for like maybe you probably so one thing about bankless, and I think about people who are in crypto. So like David and I have been bitten by the bug for a while, and like it was DeFi and money and organ reorganizing the internet. But like, but that can lead to um asilo, right? That can lead to like we have this um yeah, this bubble around us of like permables, like even in the wake of what just happened, Tim, like FTX and all of that, we're like, this is good for crypto, you know, because like it promotes decentralization. Um, but but I I'm curious, kind of your perspective as you're sort of this uh this boundary walker, as as you say. Can you get us in the head of like some of the things that um give you trepidation about entering here? Because I sense that when I when I was when I was hearing like you and and Kevin talk about it on the proof uh podcast, I could get the sense that like there were some qualifiers from Tim. You're like, it's this type of NFT, but it's not this. And I don't want to make promises and guarantees. And like the speculative thing, it felt like to me. You weren't quite like you didn't want to be associated with the scam element of crypto, which I totally understand. Or maybe I'm reading things into it, but tell me about your your trepidations.

Totally. I would say, with respect to the many caveats that I gave in the proof podcast with Kevin, it's not so much that I don't want to be associated with the scam elements. I'm not

too worried about that. Uh, at least if for anyone who has followed me for any period of time, I'm not worried about that. But I don't want people to buy

my pretty JPEGs as investments. And