PoolTogether Community Podcast #20 with Smart Investor from PoolTogether

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast, and this is Hot Mike, aka Timmy Timmy Tim Tim Tim. And listen, I'm coming to you Asynchronously, because recording the podcast with Smart Investor, we just got into it. I didn't even do an intro. I didn't even want to stop. I didn't even want to stop the momentum going in the Discord. So let's get right into it. This is Smart Investor. Here we go.

So today I am going to be buying my very first music NFT. And it's on a website called sound.it. And there's someone I asked this, this, I dunno what you'd call him, a music NFT expert on Twitter. He always posts about different, different sort of, he's got an image of the ecosystem of the music NFT world. Maybe I'll post that into the chat. Do we have a chat set up?

Yeah, we do. I just tagged you. It's under the events.

Okay, great. Let me just find that. So anyway, so he has a, so he has an ecosystem. Let me, I'll just post that in just a moment. And then I asked, okay, you've got so many different websites. So there's some for NFTs, some for artists, some for the infrastructure. And I said, look, can you, if I'm just beginning, what would you recommend? So he said, okay, go to the website sound.xyz or XYZ in the United States and Canada and listen to every single artist on that site. So I did that. I started listening and I found an artist I like. And her name is Lyrah, L-Y-R-A-H. And she had, I really liked her, the song that she'd posted. And what happens on sound.xyz, they have a very limited number of artists. And I think they're very, very, they really curate who can go on. So it's not like some websites where you can have hundreds of people, it's just a small number. And I liked her music and she, what happens on this, they sell like an NFT for 0.1 ETH and that's always gonna be the price plus of course gas fees. And you start off with, I think, 25 ETH and her initial song now went to 1 ETH. And in terms of the value, okay. Okay. Is that better? Yeah, sounds good. Okay. In terms of the value, you, it's, as Koopa Troopa was saying, it's not about trying to make the most money from these NFTs. It's about finding an artist you like and supporting them on the journey. When Lyra did her very first drop, if you like, on Sound Deluxe YZ, I think she made some like 7,000, 8,000 which is, it may not sound like a lot, but for a new artist, it's quite, quite, quite a good amount. And so then I just tagged Koopa Troopa and I said, look, this is the artist I like. And then Lyra sort of replied to me. And then this is about a couple of months ago. And then she said, okay, in May I'm gonna be doing another drop. And so I said, okay. I sent her a tweet and said, look, can you remind me of that? And then this morning, my time, she contacted me and said, okay, we've got this drop this evening, or this evening my time. So I'll be joining that today. And I've just been sort of messing around with Gemini to get my ETH, 0.1 ETH and the gas fee. And there's going to be Twitter Spaces at 12:30 EST, PST. And then the drops of 1 PM PST and in on on this website, and then we spoke a little bit on on DMs, and she was telling me that she's very focused on like the music and also the community. So she said that this will be the last drop she'll do for quite a while, and she's going to be focusing on on the music, developing the music, and also making sure that all the original Uh, contributors. So the very, the first 25 people who went in the first, the first crop, and then between 25 and 50 this time, I need to work with them, uh, with, with hopefully asked if I, if I can get in and, uh, you know, make us feel appreciated and so on. And that's the fact that I had this sort of conversation with her was quite amazing. And, uh, she's just agreed to actually do, uh, join the podcast in July. So for us here on this podcast, this will be the first podcast we've had, I think, which is about music NFTs. So she's also, what's interesting, not just an artist, but she's also experimenting a lot. She's written a contract to potentially help in this space. And, but I really like her music as well. So I think that'll be a great guest for us. And so please make sure to ask your questions and Basically, let's just see. I'd like her to explain to us how also to get into music NFTs for other people who may not be in them. So I'm looking forward to that. And Tim Yu, he's agreed to do an impromptu musical duet. That's right. Jazz style. So yeah, I think that's going to be good for you, isn't it?

Yeah, no, I gotta get used to that. I gotta listen to her music, kind of like steep in the musicianship of it. And then I think we can vibe. I think that'll be great. But Smart Investor, what you just said, your kind of journey as far as finding an artist, finding like how to find an artist, then finding an artist and then interacting with an audience, that's different, I would think, than the traditional NFT vibe. Which is get in the Discord and grind out and like do all the things to get on the allow list. What you did was you just found the artist you like and you DM'd her on Twitter and got the hookup, right? That's unique.

Yeah. Well, so I mean, to be fair, I did ask Cooper Trooper. Let me just start. If you're interested in finding out more about music NFTs, I'll just put his Twitter into the Into the chat. So it's for everyone listening, it's OOPA H T R O O P A at Cooper Trooper on Twitter, and got a weekly music NFT newsletter so you can subscribe with your email as well. And oh, because I just I'm just just reading his tweet from from a couple of days ago. He said I paid off my parents' mortgage for Mother's Day. Paid off my 5 years in crypto and it's starting to come together all thanks to ETH. But anyway, I was lucky because I, and this is the power of crypto Twitter. I just reached out to him one, I think it was like a Sunday morning or something. And I think I just replied to one of his tweets and I just asked him, look, you've given us great information for where to start. Because if you look at his, oh, so I was going to post the Ecosystems. If you go to his Twitter, he does have like a diagram which he updates with all the different protocols. And some of them are exactly like you said, Tim, like you, there are different Discords. So I think you can go to the Discord of sound.xyz or the Discord of the other platforms and so on. And many, and the platforms have, from what I understand, they have different models. So some platforms you will actually get a royalty. So you buy a certain, I think that there are different levels or so on, and then you get a royalty of the music. With this one, the one that I'm on, I don't think you get anything like that. It's again more about contributing to the artist. And actually a special thing about today is Lara said that she's gonna be donating all the profits to a charity. So. Gee, I'm very interested for us to have her on because she seems to be, it's not just about the money for her either. But just going back to your, to your, to your question, I mean, like I was completely lost about music NFTs and it just seemed overwhelming and then everything just seems, I think from, so if you're interested in music NFTs or trying to get into them, definitely follow Cooper Trooper, join his email newsletter. Go to sound.xyz, just do what it do. I'm just gonna tell you to do what he told me. Listen to all the artists, find one of the artists you like. And then what he said was they might have on sound.xyz and then you, if you wanted to sort of purchase an NFT of those, then you'd have to go into OpenSea, but those could already be expensive. So for example, Lyra's first track, the floor price the last time I looked was 1 ETH, which I think was a bit too much for me. So what he said was, okay, find the artist you like, maybe it's Lyra, maybe someone else, and then try and get onto their next drop, which I think is, I don't know if it's always 0.1 ETH or if it's just Lyra's doing this, but it's gonna be cheaper than trying to pay it on the secondary market. That's just a way of beginning. But yeah, You can, I mean, what he also said, which is very interesting, and I want to learn how to do this, he said, find a musician in your hometown and help them get into Web3. Because someone like Lyra or maybe anyone else on the sound.xyz, they're probably very advanced in terms of however many musicians there are in the world. So that's something I also want to learn. So if I met a musician on the street, like the other I think this might have been before the pandemic here in London. There was a young Australian, he was talking and he was saying, look, I came from Australia and my parents were not impressed when I told them I'm going to be a singer-songwriter. And then I traveled to France and I learned French. I met a girlfriend or whatever. And then I moved to London. And then here in London, there's so many Australians and many of them are getting into music. Trying to get into music. And I guess many are going the traditional route of to get a record label or whatever. And then these music NFTs, sorry, there's not, we shouldn't say music NFTs. Web3 allows artists to go a different route and maybe they're not all gonna make millions or whatever, but they could make a decent living or a good enough living to be able to really focus on their music. And I think you and I, all the listeners can learn what that process may be to take someone who is passionate about music, but, but wants and wants to, to explore Web3. If we can learn ourselves the steps, then we can help them. I think that's also very valuable. And that's what Crypto Trooper is also talking about. So it's not, he's not talking about just let's get an NFT, music NFT, which is going to be the next, I don't know, CryptoPunks or Bored Ape Yacht Club or whatever. So it's about contributing and helping and so on.

That's, this whole music NFT thing, I mean, this was, Koopa Troopa said it, so many people said on Twitter that music NFTs are the theme of 2022. And now we're living at a whole nother theme right now in the meltdown.

Yeah, yeah. You know? Talk about this.

But back to, but before we leave music NFTs, like I'm really fascinated with this. I'm actually presenting at NFT NYC on a way that I would love to see NFTs done, which is more, not like album track based, but more like live moment based or more like stems based, which I know those also exist, or at least the stems part. But what I wanna say is like, how does the artist that you're talking about, is it Linda? What is it?

It's Lyra. L-Y-R-A-H.

Yeah, there it is. There it is. How is Lyra? You're saying her tracks are like holding value or like the floor is pretty high? And I buy this, with the group, we're in NFT Together or NF Together, this group buy NFT group for PoolTogether. We bought the Snoop Dogg mixtape and that thing just sank like a rock. I mean, that thing's like going straight to zero. I just don't, it's really fascinating to me that Snoop can release a mixtape NFT and it'd go to like, I think it's at 0.05 ETH and we bought it at like half an ETH or something like that. And Lyra is able to like put out these tracks. She's got like 2,300 Twitter followers or almost 3,000 followers and people are really investing in the artist. So I think that's very fascinating. I wonder what the magic is.

Yeah, I think so. I'm just looking at a page now. I'll just post it in the link. So it's You can go to sound.xyz/lyrah, L-Y-R-A-H. And at the moment there's gonna be the 2 tracks. So the, this, the Hold Me is the first track. So she released, they had 25 available NFTs, all for 0.1 ETH. So she raised $5,600. And I think then, so the, the value of, so what it says is by purchasing a limited edition NFT of the song. Supporters can claim a permanent seat in the audience. So the kind of value is, and then there's like a table and so on. But then if you look at the OpenSea, I think you're looking at something like sort of 1 ETH, as I mentioned before. But the aim I think is to build this community, as you say, and to have someone like Koopa Troopa supporting her and Other people. So now I think in the next release, which is happening today, so that'll be today or last week if you're listening to this when we post it, the second one will be more, there's more people. So she's looking at like 50 available NFTs and so on. So the aim is to help her sort of develop her music. And I think there are other platforms that she may be on or looking at. And what I think is a very interesting situation is that you might have one artist like Lyra or like someone else, and they may use different NFT platforms different ways. So sound.xyz could be right at the start of your career when you're building the community. And then maybe use another one for working with people where it is a bit more of a economic thing, you know, like royalties and so on. So these are the kind of questions that would be very interesting to ask her herself. And to see how she's done it, because she's, from what I understand, she's quite pioneering in this space. Because she's been exploring this for a while as well, I understand. So I just happened to, just by chance, just thanks to Cooper Trooper, get into this area. But as you're right, 2022, Is the music NFT. So what I'd recommend to everyone listening is just please explore. And again, just explore the different platforms, explore the different kind of artists and the music that you like. I'm sure Tim is gonna release some music NFTs of his own. And then just see where that leads. It's like a journey. And that's what I feel. I feel so, I was so amazed this morning, my time. When I just had quite a long conversation on Twitter DMs with Lyra, I wasn't even expecting. And she, by the way, she DM'd me because of a tweet that I, I tweeted a month or maybe a month ago or 2 or 3 weeks ago saying, all right, please let us know when you're going to be doing your next drop. And then she contacted me. And only because of that would I have even realized about the, the, the, um, released because I might've just missed it, you know, because on the long thread. But that's the power of crypto Twitter, Web3, and so on that I've got this opportunity with an artist who I, you know, whose music I like, who's really engaged, who says she's really focused on the music to engage with someone like that. It's just, I mean, even if there's an artist that you like in general, I mean, it's just, I don't know, it's just a It's just something which connects us and so together, the community's so important. And that's what I think, as you said, the magic is in that. And of course, the quality of the music as well. So it's kind of, I'm sure there's a bit of luck to it as well that, you know, the fact that she got onto this platform, the fact that Koopa Troopa supported it, all that kind of stuff. But I think there is, it's just a new avenue, new, new, new way to explore. And for us as maybe non-musicians who are interested in this, it's It's just a case of, in the same way that we might have explored NFTs, at least a little bit, a little extent, let's also please start exploring music.

Yeah, so I have been actually putting out music NFTs, but the problem is, and this is the thing about NFTs, I just dropped it in the chat, the music NFTs I'm doing, is that if it's not on mainnet, it doesn't exist. You know what I'm saying? I mean, like, it's so, so let me tell you real quick. My story is I applied for a grant from ByWassies. So from Loom Lock NFT, LoomDart, the Wasis, they have a grants program where they take all the resales of Wasis and they put this into a big pool and they fund creators. And so I had somebody who drew me in a Wasi just for free, like an artist. And it was awesome. It had my cats on my Wasi. And I was like, oh shoot, this is really great. I should do songs for people. And so I started, I got a grant to do silly songs for Wasi holders. And then what I've discovered, and so I turned them all into NFTs and no one really, like, they would tip me a little bit, but it was so weird because they're all on mainnet and I'm creating these things on Polygon just for gas fees. So it's super cheap and I can just send them to people, no problem, and gift them out. But what I'm finding is like, if it's not on mainnet, it doesn't exist. And the second thing is, I think that because people think of a track in an album, they don't think of music as a meme. And music is totally a meme. Like if you get some earwormy jingle, so I created this Wassy Wednesday and people hate it now because they can't get it out of their heads. But it's another way for creatives to be able to like create music, like a musician where it's super low pressure because it's goofy stuff. It's like memey stuff and it actually carries pretty far and there are grants out there and people always want meme masters. Projects always want memesters and musicians can kind of, I haven't seen a lot of musicians entering the meme space. I, yeah, so I think it's a wide open area, but then I haven't solved that, you know, minting an NFT. I guess I just need to pay, suck up and pay the gas fees and mint it on mainnet to make it more desirable or something.

Yeah, it might just be because music NFTs are so new that they Because if you look at the other, like the other chains, you know, even Avalanche, Solana, Polygon, you've got basically replicas of all of the, you know, Apes or whatever. You've got the PolyDoge. I think even I've got some PolyDoge. You've got like equivalents on all the different chains. So I think it's up to the music NFTs to really show their worth kind of thing, and then they will sort of explode. But I mean, Lyra was telling me that because I was, I was saying, look, and that's one of the things today. So yeah, I've got, I have a gas fee, the gas fee could be even more, who knows. And I was saying to her, look, will I even be able to get, be in the 50? And she says, look, I think I'll definitely get the 25. But I don't think, I don't think I'll sell out my 50. And that just shows how early we are with someone. Remember these, so these are people like yourself, you know, not, it's not like Snoop Dogg, you're right, Snoop Dogg is a different, he's already known, that's different from people who are not known at all and are starting this route. So it's gonna be very, very interesting to see how Web3 and music NFTs change the model because it could be you have a music contract and you have a web and you have music NFTs, but you have different types of music. So that's kind of very interesting.

And then even with Snoop, like if Snoop just decided to drop like an airdrop to any of the mixtape holders, You know, the mixtape holders, it would shoot up, you know? Well, I don't know, again, this market, let's be real. But generally, like, there's very easy ways to add value to NFTs where Lyra might have like a fan pass. And then that fan pass gets any track that she releases, you know? And that's like the big ticket item or something that you can pay. And that would get you into all the shows. That would get you into all the pass. Yeah, it's just fun to see like this fan base community experimentation. As well as the musical genre, like how NFTs actually hold the music and deliver it as well. There's not, to my knowledge, there's not like a Spotify for music NFTs yet. Everything's very decentralized and siloed right now. There's not like a central place other than, I don't know if it's Othersy or something like that, but they don't have a music player. So it's just a, it's a whole interesting thing. But I really, what fascinated me, smart investors, just the fact that it's all happening on Twitter for you. With this artist specifically. And it's not in the Discords, which is generally where the NFT action happens as far as community building and such. And I admire the hustle, the fact that Lyra just like DM'd you weeks after you had mentioned something. That's pretty awesome. Respect the game.

Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe she hasn't, like, I mean, if every single artist On Saturday, for example, had a Discord or, you know, maybe it's, maybe she's too like, it might be that she's too, too small in terms of, you know, audience size at this point. So maybe she'll grow to that. But the fact that you can do stuff on Twitter, but remember what was that NFT? Loot, was it? Started from one tweet. So things can, things, so you do definitely need to be on crypto Twitter. Yeah. It's critical and start following the artists that you like and the platforms that you like, but also interacting with them. And that's what's unbelievable that 2 very big, well, not sure players, but 2 people in this space, should we say, interacted into this because without that, I would have had no idea what I was doing. And that's one of the things why I'm really driven. That's what's like today. I'm almost like a man or person possessed to get that heat, heat. Even though I don't really have much ETH, I don't have really any spare ETH, but I'm possessed to do this because I know, and she was so nice. She said, no pressure to buy at all. And she's completely non-pushy at all, nothing like that. And she says she's taking time off and she's going to be stopping, no more drops. It's not like she's doing a drop every month or whatever to make as much money or whatever. She said, I want to focus the next few months on my music, but also on Basically providing value to all of her community members, but that wasn't that was one of the words she used. But I just the reason I'm so driven is because of that engagement and the fact that this is a one one. I missed of course the first drop because I didn't even know about it, but I don't want to miss this because already I'm just looking at the page for her for her release, which is coming today. And I'll just post it in, into the chat. And it already says there, so the exclusive presale access for the, for the, uh, current, um, NFT holders for the, for 12 editions. So already, if you, uh, if you, um, um, if you, uh, had one of the NFTs, you'd, you'd be in line to be in a better place to get, get another one. So, Again, it's just like with anything in crypto. It's like you got to be early, and the earlier you are, the better it is. But it's just that engagement.

I love the title Sorry CBS, and it's a picture of her like stealing candy out of a out of a drugstore. That's very funny.

I didn't get that at all. I didn't understand what that was about.

Yeah, yeah. So smart investor, how do you keep track of everything? Like you're you're. You're doing the research, you're looking for that alpha always. You're in the Discords, you're in the Twitter. What's your strategy? How do you manage all of it? How do you not let it overwhelm you?

Yeah, it's a great question. So what I've, so what I've tried to do is, and for any of you who haven't read the, read my, on the, on the Substack, basically I, my story was I I heard about the story of this, another guest who I'm hoping to invite to the podcast, Erica Stanford, who's the author of Crypto Wars, a book about, what is it, all kinds of frauds and all kinds of stuff in crypto. But anyway, she got into crypto back in 2017. And then from her story, I got into crypto. I bought a whole lot of random things and then I lost out on, I lost a lot of my money, but In 2019, I bought some Dogecoin and, you know, not a huge, but the point was that it was something I believed in because of the community, because it was something different because I could sort of see a use case for it, which was to be an investor or just a participant. What can you know more about than anyone else on the planet? That's your goal. And I, at the time I thought, okay, I'm just going to look at meme tokens and sort of very low value tokens. And after a while I started to understand, okay, what, what are the, what makes a successful token? And so that gets a bit more involved because you can need to look at things like tokenomics. How many tokens are there? The full supply? Well, what's the current market cap? What's the current price? What's it, what could it realistically get to in terms of the market cap and the price? And looking at things like burn rates, all that kind of stuff. Looking at utility, looking at the size of the community. In a team, I would always look at, you know, the Twitter followers of the official account. Do they have Discord, Telegram? How engaged are the people, et cetera, et cetera. And so what happens is now I can quickly scan through projects and how I, I'm at the stage now where, for example, if you come to the PoolTogether Discord and you look at the channel, basically we should call it the Richard channel because he posts some incredible, incredible stuff. And I always ask him. Give me some alpha, give me some stuff. And my, the key thing I'm looking for is just as it was with Lyra, the artist that we've spoken about today. What is that thing that I can, I understand, I'm passionate about, I can, I can own it. So I'm not looking to get into a thousand things. What are the 2 or 3 things that I can own? So for example, there were a few things that Richard posted. One was mask.ai, M-A-S-Q.ai. And this is a decentralized, I think it's a decentralized VPN. And actually, Richard didn't post that, someone else did. But the point was, this is at an early stage, it's at a sort of pre, I think pre-launch stage. And they had a contest. And I put together a video for that, like, explainer or intro video. And then what the winners of that, which they should announce any day now, will get an NFT. With that NFT, which is only like 50 or 60 of them, you can be involved in the testing process. And so that's one thing. So then the person who recommended that gave me something else, but that was way too late and I couldn't get in early and I couldn't feel like real ownership. And the second thing is something called Lensster. I think it's called lensster.xyz. And I'm just posting it in the, in the chat, and then Tim will post this on the show notes. So this is a decentralized social media platform based on Polygon. At the moment, it's on Polygon Mumbai testnet, but again, very, very early. And if you, you can go to this Lens of XYZ, you can, I set up a movie channel there. I joined the pool together. Lenster group, which was started by Under the Sea. But I was really, this is something I can really get involved with. And also you can connect your Discord. If you go to Lenster's Discord, you can connect your Discord with your Lenster account and you can be an early participant. And this is, that's when the value of, you know, if there is this with normal projects. So basically what I do is I don't have to track of much because I'm scanning stuff. And there's only a very small amount of things that I'm interested in. And this one here, which I've told you many, many about, Lucky Roo. So luckyroo.io. This is a project which is going to be based on gambling. And by— it's called Lucky Roo because it's been started by Australians. But the thing about this project is, it's connected with Saitama, which is something I'm very much into. It's a Saitama token. It's basically like they're building a platform. So they have a Saitama Mask, which is a, you can download it on Google Play Store. And it's, at the moment it's like a wallet, but you also will have exclusive tokens like Lucky Roo. You'll have educational NFTs, there'll be gaming connected with it and so on. And Lucky Roo is very connected with that community. And if you go to Lucky Roo's Twitter, I mean, I'm not sure what the actual, uh, so this would be one of the tests I always do for a project. Uh, if you go to the Lucky Roo token, I mean, they've got 7,000, almost 8,000 followers for a project which is not even launched yet. Um, and the thing is that they always, they've taken many, many months to actually It's still, I mean, I found them like 4 or 5 months ago and they were waiting for the Certik audit, waiting for a different audit. They're waiting to release on SaitaMask, all this kind of stuff. And there's just a community that's something, but I, you know, I believe in the developers, you know, it's getting a bit of trust, but the developers are very honest. They come open, they do AMAs constantly on different platforms. They, and then the idea behind the project is that There's only a certain number of tokens. I can't remember the exact number. I think it's 10 billion, something like that. Or maybe it's a bit more than that. And then you, all the wallet holders get entered into a draw each week and there's a certain percent. Every time there's a buy and sell, there's a certain percentage which will be given, put in a wallet, and then 60, 30, 10, or something like that as a split. So you could win each week, but also they're actually planning to build proper online gambling, give you a share. I don't know about the Sure, kind of things that that's the kind of project that I really believe in, and I've actually put aside some ETH or some some uh uh some things to invest in, and that's kind of I was almost thinking of using that some of that today to to buy my my Lyra NFT, but I'm not going to do that because that's something I believe in. So that's what I'm trying to say. Takes you it does take a bit of time to get to understand okay which projects are those. which are going to be, you believe are going to be successful. So for example, Saitama at the moment is horrifying. If you look at the price, it's lost like 97, 98%. But I believe in this very strongly based on the, and it's the same, you know, with these other projects. So it's really understanding again, so number one, you need to find the area that you're interested in. So I mentioned in this interview, whoops, was telling us about Sky, I think Skyweaver it's called. It's like a, an online No, it's sort of a Web3 card game. I haven't described it very well, but it's like one of these ones where you're fighting someone else and you have cards. Beautiful, beautiful game. I mean, the graphics are amazing. It's just amazing. But like, it's just not something that I'm that interested in. Whereas Ups was saying he played like till, you know, early in the morning sometimes, and he was playing it just for fun. So when he, when he, when the Web3, and you can actually play without any play-to-earn, but at some stage there will be play-to-earn if it's not already happened. And Hoops is the person who's gonna really, really master that. It's the same with Chris K and Decentraland and Decentral Games. So I mean, I was exploring Decentraland after watching Chris K's video, intro video, like a 15-minute video, how to get into Decentraland. So Decentraland, the metaverse, how to explore and explode it. But like, we are already way, way, way, way too late for Decentraland because I think you've, I think, is it Nike, Sotheby's, all these big brands are in Decentraland. They're also in Sandbox. They're, and the price of lands are expensive. But the thing is that Chris K, Hoops, they understood those areas that they're really interested in and they got in early. And so Chris K was talking about decentral games, which I know you're heavily involved in. The poker online, play-to-earn poker game, but they were, he was in there very early. And the same for you, you've got to find the area you're interested in. And as I said in the interview, it's something that you're excited about, even forgetting about the money. So example, today I'm buying this Lyra NFT. I have no idea if it'll ever make any money for me at all, but I'm blown away. This person contacted me, engaged with me a lot, really liked the music. I want to explore. It's the same for you. You have to find other areas. It could be existing tokens, it could be new tokens. It could be, the best thing is of course something no one's even talking about now. Not NFTs, not music NFTs, not even things like PoolTogether, whatever, Gambit or whatever. Something that is being worked on right now, but not really many people are talking about. And that you can actually find on Twitter, crypto Twitter. You've got to really explore. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll ask people who I think of, you know, really have a great— I think SheGenerates. Let me see if I can find this. She's an Ethereum developer and SheGenerates. Yeah, I'll just put the— so twitter.com/shegenerates. And she's a Solidity developer, so the Ethereum platform. And she, like, I asked her questions, okay, tell me what, what you think no one's talking about. And you, and people like that will also mention different things like that. So you've got to explore, you've got to just try and try and find these people. So, so my main way is Twitter and then leads me to Discord and sometimes Telegram, but I prefer Discord. And I once asked her, she, she She once had a post like, these are the people to follow. And I asked her, can you tell me who are the people to follow? And she said, these 5, 10 people, whatever. So that's the kind of thing you're looking for. What are the areas that you are passionate about already? What are the areas which are gonna be— 2017, when people spoke about NFTs, no one was listening. What are the, what's the 2022 version of NFTs? And music NFTs is partly that, but there may be other things that we don't even know about. Um, so that's the second thing. And then third thing is really, you've got to start exploring. You've got to start getting involved to understand the tokenomics, understand the future, understand, uh, um, and then, you know, there are things that I just haven't invested in, which did quite well, but I just, I'm just not interested either because it's like Binance Smart Chain and I'm only interested in ETH. I mean, uh, Tim did get me into something called, uh, Wrestling Metaverse, although it is SMAC, SMACverse or something like that. And that was actually on Avalanche. I actually am really, really impressed with Avalanche after we had Luigi from Ava Labs on there as well. But like generally, I had my criteria and you'll have yours too after you explore it for a while. So sorry, that was a long, long answer to a short question.

No, that's— and so you said, Basically, it's like whatever you believe in, like what are the things that you believe in? And it's kind of crazy because your gut is crazy. Like you go with your gut and people who say they don't go with their gut, there's a book called The Righteous Mind by Professor Jonathan Haidt at NYU. And he talks about how no scientists, everyone goes with their gut. There's always this confirmation bias that we seek. But I do, I mean, there are just like, I watch projects just dwindle. And I'm like, I still believe in the project. I don't care. I still believe in it. I think this is awesome. I want to see it through. But Smart Investor, you said that you were way too late. You're way too late. But this market, apparently you're not too late anymore, right?

Certain things, right? That's a fair price. Let me give you some. So today I was speaking to my colleague who she actually bought BTC and ETH in, in late 2020 when it was Of course, much, much cheaper than it is now. And what she was saying was that she, the reason she got into, at the time she sold all her stocks because she realized, okay, so the investors are looking to put their money somewhere. There's too much money around and they're not enough assets. So sold all her stocks and she said, okay, saying like, what can I invest in? So at the time it was BTC and ETH. But would you like me to share what she told me about what's coming next?

Sure. Let's go. Not financial advice. This is not financial advice. Oh yes.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that right at the start. Yeah. Not financial advice at all. Um, so what she was saying was she gave me a long sort of political stroke economic, uh, discourse on which apparently many economists at Tim Woods 3, I didn't quite understand all of it. But the summary is that the 3, the questions are, what are the technologies which are going to be, especially from a hardware point of view, which are going to be, what's the right word, insourced back to the United States? Things like iPhones. So as there's kind of a breakaway from globalization and coming back more towards manufacturing in the United States or in the Western world. What are the technologies which are— so, so what, what are the products which are gonna be, um, manufactured in a home? And then what are the specific technologies within that and/or materials? So, um, one example is in commodities she gave. So the underlying technologies and the underlying— and I think technologies she meant not just The actual sub, you know, companies providing the subparts. So for example, some of the companies providing batteries for Tesla, that kind of stuff, all the parts for batteries, all the material, but also stuff like copper, she thought could be important and things like green energy. So she thinks green energy is going to be important. So then it's up to us to explore, okay, within green energies, what are the specific types of green technology? green energies, and then what, how do you power that? So for example, in wind turbines, what are, what, what, what are the key components of wind turbines? And then for example, if there's a specific metal or if there's a specific, um, process or idea, what that would be, I haven't done the research yet, but those are the things to look at. Uh, that's number one. And number 2 is, this is a big one. She's, she's, she got involved with the, she's, when she sold all her stocks. And this is a very smart person into finance. And the fact that she, I think she told me she had more than one Bitcoin, which she bought much, of course, much lower than today. So, and she didn't, she said she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't understand anything about cryptocurrency and the technology. She's looking from a finance point of view and where are the institutional investors going to be investing? And she believed at that time that institutional investors will be coming into cryptocurrency because they're customers will demand what we're seeing. But the only thing she didn't sell from her stocks in that sort of area is water ETF. And she's betting on the commodity of water. And this is very interesting because I'm sure you've either read or seen the movie, what's it called? The Big Short by Michael Lewis. And I think it's, I don't know the name. I can't remember the name of the person, but it's the character played by Christian Bale. Who, um, um, shorted, of course, these, these, uh, mortgage, uh, I can't remember what they're called, bonds or whatever they were. Um, and the thing he was looking after that was water. I remember reading somewhere he's really focused on water because there's going to be shortages. Of course, we have global warming, all this climate change, all these things. Uh, and it's not easy just to take water from the sea or lakes or whatever. Um, so, um, that's what my colleague was sort of betting on. So these are some other things that you can look into, um, trying to understand them, but that kind of involves either more research or more thinking. Um,

I mean, that's crazy because like, I mean, especially with COVID I actually stopped reading science fiction just because I felt like I was living in science fiction. And then, uh, there was this genre I started to get into, uh, when I tried to get back into science fiction, which was like eco-science fiction, like, right? Anything that's like the world, like Waterworld stuff, you know, or, you know, one of them was set in like California when it was just, I mean, now it's all in the book. It was all desert. It was just all desert. There's no water. Water was so scarce. Yeah. Yeah. So the opposite of Waterworld. And I love how your ETF, like, you know, oh no, we're going to invest in like the earth because the earth, like that kind of, those kinds of commodities are going to be rare. So we gotta, we gotta put our money there. That's crazy.

No, no, that's just on that question actually. I was just, uh, someone posted on Twitter today, um, uh, the books that Elon Musk likes. I think he's got Dune in there. He's got, he's got many based on sort of AI type thing, but of course one of the For everyone interested in, um, Web3, I guess the, the tick book is a book called Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Love, yeah, Neal Stephenson. I love Snow Crash. Yes.

Oh yeah. It's just such an amazing book. I mean, the depth of the thinking in this book, it's just unbelievable. He just said, I just wrote some random stuff. That's not true at all. That book influenced Zuckerberg, influenced Jeff Bezos, influenced many people. Um, I'm reading a book which, uh, someone, one of the Bankless guys, uh, actually posted a few months ago. He said, uh, give me books and books to read. And one of the books which was suggested was also a science fiction book. It's called Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, W-E-I-R, who wrote the book The Martian. And I've started reading it. It's just an amazing, I mean, the The level of physics and the level of astrophysics, I guess, you learn and, you know, without being technical, it's just amazing. But it's, uh, it's, it's a fantastic book that I'm, that I'm reading as well. So I think science fiction is, is really, yes, exactly this one. Um, I think it's, it's, it's really, yeah, it just really expands your mind. The other book I want to read, which I've heard is quite a great book, it's called Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, which apparently some, apparently was trying, they tried to ban it or something, but I didn't know for sure. But, um, yeah, no, no. Uh, I think it would be interesting actually to look at this eco, eco science fiction and see what people are saying, because often some of these guys do have, um, do have prescience or, you know, tsubking. Um, and yeah,

I think that And this goes along with your passions. So sometimes, you know, for me with reading, I have to, I can generally, I read books that I get into. Like there's, there's some you have to power through, you have to slog through. There's some that I'd rather listen to. And so I'll get the audiobook if I start reading the paper and I'm like, oh, this is hard, or the Kindle or whatever the ebook is. But there are 2 books that I would share. One is The Three-Body Problem. It's Chinese science fiction. I did that. Yeah. Yeah. You've read it?

I, I've read a bit of it. Yeah. And I've only read like the first few chapters. It is incredible. Uh, uh, I think that's, yeah.

Yeah. So that whole trilogy, and then there's a book, uh, a 4th book called The Redemption of Time, which was fan fiction, but it's now officially like included in the canon of the first, uh, 3 books. It's, it's beautiful and it, and it's totally worth reading all the way through, even though it's, it's a slog. It's just, it's a lot. These, these are not small books, but, um, what I love about in Three-Body Problem is the, uh, is the expansion. And not only are you talking about the whole universe, you're talking about time, like billions. Like suddenly the story is over billions and billions, if not trillions of years. The story, like, I, it just, I never think on those levels. I'm always like trying to go through my to-do list. I'm always like, what's tomorrow? Or what's the projects I gotta do? And my, my, I have these blinders on where I'm just totally focused on today or tomorrow, or maybe a week out, but to think billions of years, to think like, just like what humanity right now is a speck, a very speck on the timeline of, of, of the gap of the universe. And to think in that, so I love science fiction that it opens up, it opens up thinking in those ways. And it also opens up in like quantum too, like just even thinking about physics and how. quantum is so different than what we even know and how like even these kinds of things, like when we talk about physics and science, we actually start talking more about faith because of how like, like a lot of physicists, physicists believe in the multiverse. They believe that there are many, many parallel— they actually believe that where we think this is science fiction. And it sounds very spiritual actually, like that sort of thing. But that's no, actual physicists believe that.

No, well, that's actually a couple of things. If we, so I've been watching, um, in the UK there's a, there's this TV service where they, uh, one of these, uh, like a bit like Netflix type thing. And they have this program from, from the '90s called Quantum Leap. Uh, and it's like a, um, it's based on string theory. It's, it's, so basically the, the scientist in there, um, he can time travel within Within his own lifetime, and he and he he jumps into different people's lives within the within his lifetime. Getting from has quite a bit of a religious aspect to it as well. But the other fun film which not many people know about, it's called ah it's called Spider-Man movie into the spot. Yes, yeah, no exactly. And it's lots of quantum computing coming up.

We are very close, very close to that happening. Seeing this in crypto that a lot of these scams, a lot of these hacks are nation state. Like we have to change how we do passwords as soon as quantum hacking is available. Into the coins, as we've talked about with many zeros, and then you want many zeros.

Those was that, I'm not sure what they did was they completely, so at the time, you know, Bitcoin, they, they, they, they allowed 1 quadrillion tokens and then they sent 50% to Vitalik. Many zeros, but they're not going as crazy as they once were. Just on that point.

Yeah, totally. That's, uh, but, but, but, but as far as your investing strategy and stuff. There's so many things that can take your attention away. There's so many things that you can go after.

That's true.

You explained to us like what you explained to us, like how you go about going through things and you do stuff that you care about or that really piques your interest or people, you know, when you have an artist who actually takes the time to talk to a stranger like you, like this, and that's very impressive. You want to trust projects with the team that you really believe in that are open and honest and very customer service friendly, that sort of thing. I get that. But But, uh, but you also have PoolTogether. So why do you keep, why do you keep hanging out at PoolTogether?

This is a very, very strange thing. So the strange thing was that I, so I set up this Substack, uh, you know, including the, the, the podcast, the weekly community interview, the newsletter. Other people, but I sort of set it up and I sort of still work on it. I set up the marketing working group and yeah, other people now run it, but I did that. I contributed a lot, but the funny thing was at one stage I only had, I mean, I had like maybe a couple of hundred dollars in version 3, but I only had $5 in version 4 and I didn't really have much into it. And the thing which kept me in PoolTogether was, has always been the community being able to be involved. So to give you a brief story, I found out about PoolTogether. So basically back in 2021, oh my God, it seems like such a long time ago now. But in sort of mid-2021, it was all about DeFi. DeFi. I know, I think I missed DeFi summer. Might have been the summer before. Everyone was still going on and on about DeFi, but I just didn't understand it. I didn't understand yield farming. I mean, people try to help me, but then the question is, here's the thing before I get onto the main point. Do you, as you the listener now, do you try and understand These very complex things like DeFi, things that you don't grasp. And maybe there, maybe there's a sense to it. And for example, maybe the people out there, the normies, so to speak, who are not getting into crypto because they don't understand it, if they took the time to understand it, maybe it could be life-changing for them. So that's one aspect. Do you do that? So let's say I'm someone now who's already invested a bit into crypto. Do you do that? Do you go into these things which are more complicated and fight and work to, to really understand them? Or do you go to stuff which just comes to you naturally, easily? You love and enjoy it. So I wanted to try and understand more about DeFi. So I got the book How to DeFi by CoinGecko. They now have 2 versions, basic. At the time I bought it was literally, I think the month before they released the 2 versions. So I just had the one book and they, they, they now, they talk about many different projects. They talked about PoolTogether and I really understood the concept because in the UK we have premium bonds, but even the concept was very simple. They explained the concept of alchemics, which is against everything I'm involved in, and a few other things. And I really, by reading this book, I understood these things. I came to the PoolTogether Discord. Everyone was so friendly. You had Leighton, who's the CEO of the company behind PoolTogether, answering my questions. I was tipped some pool, and I was just asking questions and people saying, you know, these are amazing and stuff like that. And then I started, I came to the community calls, and I wasn't involved, you know, just listening for many months. And then eventually, I got my, my microphone working, etc., etc. And, and then I just started getting involved. And then what would happen was people would say stuff on the call, like, like, said something like, we want a newsletter, we don't have a newsletter. So then I just set up the Substack. And I had a vision for it. Like, I wanted these 3 aspects, like the podcast, the use that at the community interviews and just started setting it up and starting to happen and started getting involved. And when we did this, no one was getting paid. And many, many people, yourself, I think, was it Pedrick did the image, got involved, Chiarp got involved, a lot of people got involved. We didn't do anything for money, but funnily enough, later on the grants committee came to us and then they awarded us stuff. And then I posted that into, I deposited that into version 4 and then I won In my first $5 prize. And then Leighton actually delegated to me quite a large sum. Uh, and I never asked him, just he did that. And I now won my second $5. But the point is, it's just, I keep asking myself and I said to you, Tim, I said for a while ago, I'm stepping away from PoolTogether, but then I'm back. It's just something which draws me. And again, it's the community aspect. It's a way of getting involved. It's a way of contributing. And then it's funny because I was, um, some of the colleagues in my, my company, I was, um, sort of, uh, onboarding them into crypto. And one of them, I just told them, I think he was looking at Alchemix or maybe a few other, maybe it's other, um, DAOs or, or, or areas, but let's just say it was Alchemix or whatever. I said, look, you can, you can just basically do what I didn't pull together in Alchemix or whichever other Discord or wherever you like and you work by contributing. So he's from a different country. So I said, you know, you can own, like for example, if it's Spanish, you could create a Spanish channel. You could, you could do videos, you could apply for grants, whatever you could really think. And then you could really get involved that way. And so it's all about contributing and maybe it's a year's worth of work. So like, I don't know, this has been at least 7, 8 months more that I've been working with Pull Together or on the Discord. Something which kind of comes to me. And then, you know, the fact that I think you as well, uh, the fact that we sort of bonded and stuff and you, you, here's the thing. I learned about this thing called Wrestling Metaverse on Avalanche. And you told me about that. And then I got in on, we were one of the 750 OGs, uh, NFT holders. And the guy behind it, he's saying, look, I want to make this a $100 billion AAA game. And the people who were there early, you know, you're going to get now tokens, the WM. I think they've changed it to Smashverse because they're going away from just professional wrestling to also boxing to MMA. So it's going to be combat sort of metaverse, if you like. But because we were early in there, we're going to be getting, you know, these other NFTs, other sort of benefits without doing anything more. But you showed that to me. Similarly, Richard showed us other things. And then like, you know, I'm thinking maybe of going to, coming to New York next year and I can meet yourself. I can meet Richard. I can meet Leighton. So these are the things which have come to me just by contributing. And as I said, it's not necessarily about money at all because I wasn't expecting anything. Even what I got was maybe, you know, much less than the, than the, you know, the time I spent, but it's more than that. And it's about that kind of passion, that contribution. And with Web3, everyone listening, it's your, the point is you have the, almost like the obligation if you're listening to this to contribute in some way to And that could be, just like we were talking about at the start, Cooper Trooper was saying, find the musician in your hometown and help them get into Web3. So of course, first you've got to understand, that was what I was, and I want to ask Lyra that, and maybe we'll ask her when she comes onto the podcast in July. How can we, you know, order a musician in our hometown into Web3? But these are the kind of things by contributing, you get much more than, than, you know, you get much more than you expect in many ways, many different ways that you can't even anticipate. So that's what kind of brought me to pull together. And I often question, what am I doing here? But I'm still here. That's kind of very interesting.

Well, we're glad you're still here, Smart Investor. Thanks for, you know, coming on the pod, giving us the alpha, giving us your strategies. It's fun to talk. I mean, we can go everywhere, going into the science fiction. We could talk about cats. There's so much that we could do, but we gotta cut it off somewhere. So It's, you've given us an hour, so thank you so much, Smart Investor, for being here. And, uh, anything else you wanna say before we, before we, we sign off?

Uh, yeah, no, I didn't think just to sort of, yeah, find the things that you believe in, find the things that you, and yeah, not everything's gonna work out. Uh, and you know, in a couple of weeks' time, we're gonna be having Glenn Goodman, who's the author of a book called The Crypto Trader. And so I recommend his book if you, if you're interested in crypto investing. And he's been investing since 2017 or earlier. Well, in fact, he's been investing in many things way before that, but he started sort of investing in crypto 2017. But in this book, and I'm sure, you know, you'll be asking questions about this, he also talks about technical analysis. He'll give you sort of an overview. How can you apply that to crypto? Because he's also saying that it's not just buy and hold. So like with Bitcoin, it's If you sell, so if you had, um, if you sold your Bitcoin at $1,000 and then now it's at whatever, $30,000, then you could get almost double your Bitcoin, that kind of stuff. So he also talks about when to know how to sell, and that's what I'm just starting to, to learn more about now. I, I don't really have that, uh, understanding yet, or, or, or I'm trying to develop that. So it's a journey that we're all going on. And we always, so that's all I'd say, you know, find your areas that you're passionate about. How can you contribute? You know, learn as much as you can and you will sort of learn when to buy, when to sell, when to hold, all these kind of things. So this is a journey and Ben Goodman himself will describe much more to us in a couple weeks.

All right. Thanks so much, smart investor. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to And we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode, so visit the Pulled Together Discord and let us know.