#12: Austin Schlessinger - Sleeping better, ghostwriting, and Twitter scandals

What's up? Welcome to another episode of Brain Blast. Today we've got my friend Austin Schlesinger on. He is a writer focused on health tech. You've probably seen him on Twitter for some of his viral threads about different companies ranging from Sweetgreen, Eight Sleep, all that good kind of stuff. He is the man. Get ready for a great episode. Enjoy. All right, so we got Austin on Austin and I have— how many times have we hung out in person? Twice? I don't even know.

Twice.

Yeah, twice.

Once or twice.

So Austin, all right. First question for you. How do you write the perfect thread?

Ooh. Okay. So I think it all starts with a really great hook and it took me a while to understand this, but once I kind of got that, then I realized that you just need to spend it like a lot more time on the hook than, than I thought. So write a really good hook. Second part is, you know, fill in the middle and then have a clear call to action at the end. So like, what, what do you want someone to do as a result of, you know, reading your thread? So that's kind of like the guts of a good thread. And then I throw— distribution plays a huge part. In that as well. That goes with any content though. Like, I feel like a bunch of people put, myself included, like just put a ton of time into like creating the content and then they press publish and then it's like, okay, go viral. But that's just kind of not how it works. You kind of like, you have to send it to a few people. So I think that's kind of what goes into making a good thread.

Facts. I feel like there's no Charlie bit my finger anymore. Like there's very few accidental viralities. Um, just kind of interesting. Did you read that, um, speaking of viral, that article that, uh, Jonathan Haidt put out with, um, The Atlantic? Paul Graham tweeted, a bunch of people were tweeting about it.

No, I ran into that.

Oh, it's kind of wild. He was like just talking about like the fall of America in the last like 10 years. Um, and it's just, you know, talking about social media and comparing it to like some James Madison stuff. I couldn't even relate to the whole thing to you. It was interesting though.

What was it called?

Um, I'll have to send it to you, but I think it was in The Atlantic, um, by Jonathan Haidt. H-A-I-D-T.

Here we go. Yeah, yeah, it was the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.

Yeah.

Oh wait, Okay. I like skimmed through this, but I was in the middle of something and I was like, I need to like sit down and read this. And I just never got to reading it.

Yeah. I spent my Saturday just reading it like throughout the day, kind of chilling in bed. Not the whole day, but in and out. Yeah. You used to host a podcast, correct?

I did a while back.

Rest in peace or rest for now or what?

I think rest for now. I guess like a little bit of background on that. I started my podcast in March of 2020. So that was like peak pandemic. I had just gotten the call that like Rutgers was shutting down and everybody had to go home. So I like went home, was finishing up my classes as a senior, and I was like, I'm just gonna start doing a podcast because I don't know, I like podcasts and Started, I think the first 2 or 3 of them were just me like riffing on concepts that I was taking this like crazy journalism class at the time. And it was just making me think a lot. And I was doing like lots of, lots of writing, but publishing under like a, what's it called? Just like a Twitter account that like not my main Twitter account. It was actually a part of the class. Like it was like, read this stuff and then tweet your ideas and all the class like follow. It was like a pretty, pretty unique thing, but long story short, my first couple episodes were me just like riffing on some ideas from, from that class. And then it transformed into me interviewing a few friends and I ended up just interviewing a bunch of people. I think I did like 40 interviews or something like that. Like. It was crazy. It was just like a total sprint, try to get as, try to interview as many people as I could before starting at Deloitte. So that was like, that was my podcast background. I'd love to do it again, but it just takes a lot of time. And I took a lot of like pride in making sure that it was high quality and whatnot.

And see, that's your problem. Making high quality. I know it's just gotta be, dude, low quality, man.

That's so true.

Yeah, I'm somewhat joking, but at the same time, I just straight up use Anchor, a $50 mic, and like, I don't know, I'm cool with it, you know? Um, yeah, you had Brandon Zhang on, right?

I did. I had Brandon Zhang. I had Ari Lewis, if you ever came across him.

He's—

I haven't spoken to him in a while, but when I first came on Twitter, like, Ari was big on Twitter. He was trying to grow an audience there. And then now he has like a space-focused newsletter that's like crushing it. I also interviewed Mike Martocci, who's the founder and CEO of SwagUp. SwagUp's like a—

They're like blowing up, I feel like.

Yeah, dude, we played golf together. We went to the same high school. And yeah, he was a, he was a really good golfer, like really good guy. I was a freshman at the time, so he was driving me. He drove me to a few practices. So yeah, Mike is a, is a cool guy and interviewed him. And I think my like number one interview podcast was with my professor, Professor Waj, we called him. His full name's Wajahat Jalani. And he's like such an interesting dude. We keep talking about— I haven't spoken to him in a few months, but we keep saying that we need to have another podcast, but he's, he's, he was like by far my favorite professor. And yeah, it was, that was a good one.

Nice. How has Deloitte been? Are you planning your escape or what's, what's going on?

I'm happy right now. I'm trying to figure out this ghostwriting thing on the side. And we'll see where, where things go from there, but it's, it's nice. Like I really haven't had to do much traveling as most management consultants have to do. So I've, you know, I have a client and a bunch of people I work with live in Austin. So I've done a few trips out there, which has been cool. But other than that, I've just been working from home, which gives me the— gives me some time to You know, write and build up this business. So that's kind of what I'm focusing on right now.

Nice, man. What, uh, what have been the cool projects that you're ghostwriting for right now? Like you don't have to obviously say names, but, uh, themes or, or any cool threads that you're working on.

Yeah. So fortunately both of my clients at the time are health-focused and are building things that are kind of align with what I believe in. So it's been very cool to kind of be in a position where I'm getting, I'm getting paid to learn about this stuff and also kind of like promote a product service and ideals that kind of align with what, what I believe in. So I think the like specific ideas that have kind of I've kind of focused on, on the ghostwriting front and also on my personal account is sleep. It's just the benefits of sleep and kind of just from write, like ghostwriting with this client and also just me being curious about the benefits of sleep. It's just kind of totally changed my framework on like working out nutrition and just like The pyramid of health where it's like sleep is at the bottom. If you're not getting a good night's sleep, then you probably shouldn't work out. So it's just like, I don't know, sleep has kind of been, helped me like make like binary decisions, whether like, hey, if you didn't get X amount of sleep, you're probably gonna feel crappy and anything you do on top of that is just gonna be worse. So just like take it easy. So.

Facts. What are some tips for sleep?

Hmm. I mean, there's a bunch. There's like, I guess I'll share like the ones that have been most impactful for me. The first one is like not drinking caffeine in the afternoon. I used to be the dude that was like drinking coffee, like until now it's 5:40 PM, like, or we both are. So it's like, Drinking coffee, it's totally gonna mess up your sleep. So I try to cut that off by like 1:00 PM. So I'll still have like an afternoon cup of coffee, but caffeine really mess— I learned really messes up my sleep. I don't know how I did it in college cuz I remember literally drinking coffee at like midnight and trying to stay up. Like, I feel like if I, if I knew what I knew about sleep in college, I would've been just an overall better student and probably just like been much happier and school would've just been much easier. But caffeine has been a big one. Eat. I've been trying to like not eat late at night. That's, I've, I noticed that that messes me up, which is also kind of tough because I go to the gym late and I come back and it's like, I need to, I need to eat something now. Um, I think those are probably like the two that have been Most impactful. I also got an Oura Ring recently, so nice. Yeah, it's been nice to kind of see and like test different, how different habits like affect me.

So yeah, I don't know if you've heard of Michael Brandt's frameworks on, on the Oura Ring where he like, him and I had this conversation when I interviewed him for my old project and he basically described how Getting an Oura Ring or getting a Levels for like 6 to 12 weeks, like, is like a system update for a computer. And you don't need to like wear it for the rest of your life. You just like, you wear it for like 6 months, you see what you're doing wrong, or maybe 6 weeks or 12, you know what I'm saying? But, and then you can take it off for a bit and then hop back on. And currently I'm in the off Oura Ring stage. Mine got stolen at the gym. And so I'm kind of—

No.

Yeah, I mean, I took it off, but like, I put it on the treadmill. It's all good. I feel like I'm sleeping well. And I know from having it for almost, I guess, 8 months what my triggers are, especially caffeine as well. That's a huge one.

Yeah, that's an interesting concept because I had a similar experience. With Whoop. So I wore, I first got a Whoop, I think like in 2019, my parents got it for me, or maybe 2020. My parents got it for me. They got me like a 2-year membership. I think it was when I graduated. That's what it was when I got, that was my graduation present. And like, Whoop is great for the first 6 months. I learned a bunch about myself, but then eventually it was just like, diminishing returns. Like, I just was familiar with what I was doing. And then another thing, I'm not sure if you've experienced this, but like when you have a wearable device, like it can also mess with you too. It's like you set your move goal on your, your Apple Watch and you're like, I have to hit that, you know, 1,000 calories on for move or whatever. Same thing with Whoop. It's like if I go and do a workout and my strain isn't above, you know, 14, like I got to go out and do something else. So like psychologically it can mess with you. Like, I remember there were certain times when I was wearing a Whoop and I would hit like a, like horrible, horrible CrossFit workout. And I would, it would be like 8 strain, like 6 strain. And I'm like, dude, I just like sold my soul to this workout. And now I'm going to like, now I'm going to like go and like go for another run because Whoop is not telling me that, you know, I worked out hard enough. So. Yeah, I totally agree with your kind of like 6-month or 6-month sprint concept. I also think that, I mean, this kind of plays into that as well. It's like long-term use of these things is probably not too healthy for your brain, especially like if you're— there's some sort of like gamification aspect of it too. I think that there has to be like enough is enough. Like, hey, it's not going to be able to capture everything. You probably like put in the work today. You're all right.

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely feel that. Um, I think the last time we talked, I don't know if it was via text or call, but you were, you were a little injured, right? So you weren't working out as much. How are you feeling?

I'm feeling good now. Um, I actually wrote about this and I think it was my last newsletter.

Oh yeah. You got in a car crash, bro. Didn't you? Yeah.

Yeah, so yeah, so I'll, I'll tell a quick story. So my girlfriend and I were driving up to, we're driving up to Stowe, Vermont to go snowboarding. Rachel skis, I snowboard, but we were driving up and huge blizzard comes through. Literally can't see the car in front of us. Um, wind is literally like whipping us off of the road. Rach is driving and We're literally cruising at like 30 miles an hour with our hazards on for probably like 2 hours. Um, weather was not getting any better, but we were like, we were determined to keep going. We've come up on a bridge. We start sliding one way, start sliding the other way. Rachel, like, just trying to fix it. And I'm like, don't try to fix it. Like, we're just going straight, right? We like hit the front part of the car. We spin around a few times. And it was like, we were totally fine, but, um, it was like super traumatic. Long story short, we ended up driving the rest of the way. We ski 3 days, we drive the car home. I finished, it was the last week of the CrossFit Open. So I had to go to the gym and like hit the workout after I'd been skiing for 3 days, got into this car accident. It was the hardest workout of the Open by far and didn't do well at all. Like the entire gym was like cheering me on. Just not good. So I posed like a really bad score. And after like a weekend of skiing and doing that and the car accident and everything, I go back into the gym like the next day and we're doing like heavy front squats. And I was like in the bottom of the squat and I was coming up and it felt like someone shot me in the back. And I literally like was immobile for like 2 weeks. So I'm fine now, but that was, that's my story. It was a crazy, like. Crazy month.

Yeah, that's a, that's a weird turn of events. I was, uh, Stowe's nice though. It's a good town.

Yeah, it was, it was really nice. Lots of, you know, good places to hang out. We had a good group. It was like me, my girlfriend, and my fraternity brother and his girlfriend. So we were just hanging. We all have Epic Passes, so we were just kind of like living it up, finishing out the, finishing out the Epic Pass for the for the season.

So nice. I was in Vail, I guess, 2 weeks ago with my girlfriend and a couple friends.

Nice.

Such a vibe. Also, yeah, I don't have an Epic Pass, but it's just worth it if you go skiing like 5 times. Like even you don't need to go that often.

Yeah, I totally didn't go 5 times. I only, I, I did like a, it was like a 5-day whatever, like pass. And I just couldn't find the time to go. Like, it's just like, you think that every weekend is free until you realize that every weekend is not free. Like, you have to— I think it makes sense that, hey, if you're gonna go to— go out west, go to Colorado or something, and like you're gonna be there for 5 days, like get an Epic Pass instead of spending $200 a day on a lift ticket. But otherwise, if you don't have shit planned, it's like you're throwing your money away.

No, for real. Are you reading anything good right now?

Um, so I just came across Alex Hormozi's content. Not familiar with Alex. Sorry, is it Alex Hormozi? I really hope I'm saying his name right. Yeah, Alex Hormozi. So, so Liam, Liam Kelly's dad, you know Liam, I think you interviewed him on this. Yeah, so Liam was like, dude, you've never— like, he was like, he made like a reference to Alex Hormozi. I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. He's like, you out of anyone doesn't know who this guy is? And I'm like, no, I don't. So I've just been totally just absorbing his content. And he has a YouTube channel. He's a crazy story. He was like, he was in management consulting for a couple years, then he became a gym trainer, and then he started buying up gyms, and then he hit this threshold where it was like, I need to do something else other than just buy gyms, or I'm just gonna— I'm spreading my time like across too many things. I'm not gonna be able to scale it. So he built out like an education/consulting service for people to help them buy and operate gyms. He did that for a little bit, and now he has— it seems to be like he's building out like a, almost like a holding company, I think. But long story short, I've just been reading through his stuff. He has a lot of stuff on YouTube. He also has a book on Amazon for like a dollar. So I just started reading that.

Oh shit, wait, I recognize the book. I was just at my parents' house this weekend. They own a few kickboxing gyms and they have that book. So yeah.

Oh, no way.

Yeah. So they've definitely heard of it. Okay, good shit. Yeah.

I also just bought this. See, Meditations.

Oh shit, that's great. Nice. Is it your first time reading it?

Yeah, I mean, I've, I've had it recommended to me a thousand times and yeah, I filled out like some survey that Slack sent me. It was like, for a $10 Amazon gift card, like spend 45 minutes doing the survey. And I was like, 45 minutes, sure. And I got the gift card and then I bought Meditations.

So very nice. I feel like your hourly rate's a little higher than like $15 an hour, man.

Dude, I was just too, I was too deep in it. I was just like, oh, like, all right, let's, let's dive in here. And then I was like halfway through and the meter was like only like a quarter of the way. And I was just like, oh my God.

So yeah. Damn. I'm reading. Yo, have you read Super Pumped or Bad Blood? Either of those?

I haven't.

So good, man. It's the Uber story, the Theranos story. Just fascinating shit. Crazy. I'm reading a book called The Dictator's Handbook right now. Very odd, but kind of cool. Similar to Super Pumped, honestly. But yeah, I was reading one called Humans as a Service. It's, it's almost like a— just talking about the gig economy, I don't know why I was so fascinated with it the last couple months. I guess I was doing some freelance and I just hopped down that fascination route. Um, I don't know. Wait, back to, uh, freelancing for a second. Do you use a Stripe account or are you like a 1099?

I'm a 10— I believe a 1099. I opened a bank account through Novo. Um, super cool. It allows you to invoice like directly from the platform. Um, it also has a feature where you can set aside— I did a bunch of research on this. I was like, what's the best way to do this? And I came across Novo. And it also has a little function where you can set aside money for taxes and whatnot. So I've been happy with it so far.

Nice, nice. Good shit. I, um, I actually, yo, fun fact, I quit my job before I got my job offer. Cause I was freelancing for like 4 people and like doing well. So I just like quit. And then all of a sudden I got the job offer like 2 days later. I was like, oh, all right, cool, cool. I'm doing that. That worked out.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it was wild. But I'm trying to figure out right now if I'm allowed to freelance for other people or if there's a, 'cause like a journalist, you know, conflict of interest stuff. So I might have to like branch out of, I don't know. I don't know what I'm gonna do. 'Cause I was freelancing for like 4 Web3 projects and then I don't know if I can do that. So we'll see. But always nice to have that side money coming in. What was that? I think I read it in your newsletter somewhere you were, you made some good money gambling.

Yeah, so my, my brother— all credits to my brother Luke— so he figured out a way to like take advantage of the free money that FanDuel gives you, or like all these gambling sites give you when you sign up. So essentially, let's say for, I don't know, you sign up for FanDuel, they give you for every dollar that you put in up to $1,000, they'll give you a $1,000 free bet. So the caveat to that is that you have to play through the $1,000 that they give you, but you don't need to throw that money away. What you can do is that you put that money into another book and then you just hedge the bet against the money that you have to play through. So he figured out him He has a couple very, very smart friends that have helped him figure out like how to arbitrage the system and take, take advantage of all these free bets. So I have like $10,000 in, in my brother that he needs to help me like make. So I need to like take him out for breakfast or something and sit down with them and figure all this stuff out. I've done it. He's helped me with a couple of them, um, but he has like a whole system in place now. His friend just developed an app to do it, and it's a lot of work, but that's some SBF shit.

No, that's cool. No, that's dope. I think I've gambled once maybe, but I guess NFTs is gambling, so it's definitely gambling. Have you bought any since AO?

Yeah, so I've bought— 2 Sensei.

What'd you get?

I bought 3 from the Cunning Wolves Society.

Okay, I got Cunning Foxes.

So I was, I was thinking about getting Cunning Foxes, but don't.

They're cool looking, but like the Discord, like they're full of idiots, man. They're just drunk assholes. So yeah, but they look cool.

I think I'm in the disc— I Cunning Fox, is that the one backed by Mario?

Oh, I have no—

no, no, that's Philosophical Foxes. Sorry.

Yeah, no, that one's cool. Mine is not. Mine, like, it was the first NFT I bought.

So actually, just so I bought those 3 Cunning Wolves.

How are they doing price-wise?

They've been pretty stable. The, the whole like crux of the project is that— are you familiar with Nansen?

With what?

Nansen? No. So essentially it's software that I really haven't spent too much time looking at, but it's software that helps you find like NFT projects and yeah, surface the signal on the blockchain. Real-time crypto. So essentially what these Cunning Wolves guys are doing is that it's a project to build out or to create another Nansen, a competitor to Nansen. So yeah, so the, the way that they're doing it is that if you have a cut, like if you have this NFT, then you, you get beta access. You get, um, you know, you— I, I don't know if that's going to be the only way for you to have access to this software they're, they're building out, but I'm banking that they're going to build something pretty cool. And it's— Discord has been pretty responsive. They host like regular AMAs. It's definitely a long-term play, but yeah, I mean, all this shit is—

I, I, yeah, I bought, um, I'm disappointed. I bought a $1,200 fuck render. Uh, it's like a fuck avatar, it's called. and it gives you access to like 3D universe or whatever that they built called Lucidia. Fuckrender is huge. He's got like 180,000 Twitter followers or whatever. And you know, he's sold millions. And so I was super excited to get in this 3D metaverse. And then I open it up for like 2 minutes and I'm just nauseous. I'm like, oh, this is not what the metaverse is supposed to be like. So I'm like, ah, I'm going to sell this shit. I can't even use it. It's like you're like traveling around in space and like it's, it's just wacky. Dude, these cunning wolves are kind of cool. One of them looks like my dog, so I might have to get it.

They are cool. And the art is like awesome.

Yeah. Yeah, it's really cool. I— yeah, the art is really impressive, actually. I'm curious about what they're building. That's definitely an interesting project.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's weird. Dude, I had the Wanderers guy on my podcast and then started working with him, and that was kind of dope. I started writing for him a bit and bought some of those, but we'll see how those go. Hopefully, hopefully doing well, but no idea. It's just like so hard, impossible to predict.

Yeah, I was like, I was into, I got into a bunch of like alpha groups. I also have like, I have friends that have, that were like super early on. I'm sure you had like the same thing. Yeah, yeah, early on Bitcoin, early on Bored Apes. Like they have punks, they told me to buy all that stuff. And I was just like, no, I'm not doing it. And I'm just like, I need to just find one thing. So a few months ago, I was just like, got into a bunch of alpha groups and I was like totally into it. And then I just realized, I'm just like, I'm locking up all of my like capital in these, like this digital art. And it's very, It's not like you can't just like trade it in for cash like right away. So I kind of put that on the back burner for a little bit and then jumped into DeFi, which was like a little bit easier for me to understand.

Wait, same, same more. What are you doing DeFi-wise?

Yeah, so I, I bought— do you know Nat Eliason? Yeah, actually, um, I've never spoken with him, but Yeah, um, I've never spoken with him either, but yeah, I've— I feel like I know because I've, I've read a bunch of his blogs and I bought one of his courses. It's like DeFi 101 and just like super easy to follow, quick videos. There's a Discord community behind it and I just essentially learned about like what is liquidity pooling, what does it mean to stake What is it like? What is a DEX? Like all of these things. And it was good like to understand the fundamentals of everything. And then I just started, I got caught up like in the DeFi Twitter. I've listened to like a bunch of like DeFi podcasts. Long story short, what I'm in right now is I have most of like my my crypto net worth in Anchor Protocol.

Okay. What's that?

So essentially it's— oof, let me make sure I'm saying this right. I might get it wrong, but it's where I'm staking like UST. So UST is a stablecoin. It's stablecoin staking essentially. So you— it's a protocol on the Luna blockchain. And what you do is you, you know, the process to get there, that's kind of like the way I think about it, is that you go to like an exchange. So for example, like Gemini, I use— no, I use Crypto.com. Crypto.com, buy Luna. Shoot that over to your Luna wallet, um, exchange it— exchange your Luna for UST, and then put your US— lock your UST in Anchor Protocol. When you put your money in Anchor Protocol, you are guaranteed 20%— right now it's 20% on your money, they're 20% APY. So, which is kind of crazy, like, that's much more than the stock market, that's much more than any savings account. So I just figured with all like the volatility that's going on with in the crypto space and then also just inflation and whatnot, having your stuff in stablecoins is probably like a, a good place to be. I'm exploring other investments now, but I understand it. I feel like I understand it. I need to like— I, on my to-do list, like I want to write like a deep dive on on Anchor and kind of what I learned there. I have it, I have like stuff somewhere, but I'd love to pull it together to actually like test to see if I actually know what the hell I'm talking about. Because now that I'm trying to explain it to you, I'm like, I don't, I don't really get it, but I'm making 20% APY.

No, I got you. I, um, yeah, that's like, uh, it was like the Zeus one. What was that? Uh, Olympus DAO. Um, but That one, I think it fell apart. I'm not sure, but I could never— Some of this shit is just so hard to understand if it's legit or not, if you don't have a technical background. I know very little coding and yeah, it's hard to understand some of this stuff. I was reading about ZK rollups and all that kind of stuff and zero-knowledge proofs today. Trying to write an article or successfully writing an article for The Define about it. And it's just, yeah, so much new stuff every single day. But that's the fun of it, I guess.

Yeah, it's, it's like, it's such an interesting space because everybody's just trying to figure it out right now. But I feel like there's definitely like I— let's like pick your brain about this too. It's like, I feel like there's, there's definitely a place for storytellers and people that have that like technical understanding slash storytelling background slash have bought a few NFTs, maybe dabbled in DeFi, to come in and be like, to these like, you know, massive projects, just be like Nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about. Like, somebody needs to break this shit down so like it can actually reach the masses because ultimately that's kind of where everybody wants to go, right? Like, we don't want to just like be the, you know, 3% of the world that's like invested in crypto. It's like, if we want to make it mainstream and like we truly believe in decentralization, there has to be folks that come in and they're like, this is how it works. Like, when you buy this NFT, like this is the value in having this NFT. Here is our roadmap, this is how we're going to communicate with you. And that's like a pain point for me, and that's kind of what turned me off to like NFTs in general, because it's like, am I just going to take this advice from some smart person, or like, can I— how much due diligence can I do on my own? I feel like there's someone like— someone could come in and just be like, we're making this easy for everybody.

Yeah, no, it's true. I, uh, I talked to a guy yesterday, Noah Edelman, He has a blog or like a newsletter that's doing pretty well about Web3. And he's a freshman in college at Northwestern, maybe. And he's got, I think it's called Shift. He's thinking of changing it to like WTF Crypto, which I think is such a better name. But I think it's necessary. And what I'm really fascinated about is in the Web3 media space is, where it goes from here, like cartoons, that kind of stuff, like the Bored Ape movie. Yeah. What about Super Smash Bros with Bored Apes and doodles and CryptoPunks and all that stuff? And what about the fiction stories? I published that one with Late Checkout and I saw somebody else publish that with another science fiction story kind of like that. I'm really— that's what I'm really curious about. Excited about. But yeah, all these places, like, they, you know, they pay people like us who are good writers to write and educate people on it. You know, I was working with the Wanderers guys, making good money doing that. And, um, they have, you know, it's crazy. There's just so much funds, um, available to, to do this, and they understand how important education is. Um, I am curious, like, when It's interesting. We've seen artists become founders this year with NFT artists. I guess writers become founders with Substack as well, but I feel like Mirror is the best chance for writers to become founders in terms of selling NFTs of articles, but I just don't think that's really going to happen, but I don't know. Some people do it, I guess.

Yeah. I don't know. I like really haven't been able to wrap my mind around Mirror, but just the idea of kind of artists being fairly compensated for their work. I feel like that's, that's fair. I think that there's so many artists who are getting gypped, like whether it doesn't matter what kind of art you're creating, it's just removing that middleman, which I feel like needed to be needed to be there in like Web2 still needs to be there in some places, but like once the infrastructure is— and it's getting there— is like stood up to kind of like truly decentralize and connect the artist with the consumer, then I feel like, you know, that's the home run. And I don't know what that looks like from like a writer perspective because— did you see that thing with like somebody Bought the NFT of Jack's like first tweet or something like that.

Yeah. And the value has dropped like crazy.

I mean, that's, that has, that's like the use case, right? It's like, okay, if Jack Dorsey's, you know, first tweet on Twitter has, doesn't have value, then what is Austin Schlesinger's, you know, article he posted last week? Like what, what does that have to, like, what can that turn into? Not probably like 10 years from now, I'm probably going to be like, I don't know, have a different perspective on that kind of stuff. But I don't know.

No, it's true. Um, two things. I— yeah, there's— this makes me think of two things. The first is Punk 6529 has this quote where he's like, and I tweeted the other day, basically like, tech reaches consumers when people stop talking about the tech. And so with NFTs, that's, that's how he realized that NFTs are important because he wasn't talking about the tech with his friends, he was just talking about little monkeys. And then I was chilling at the Scarlet DAO, which is like a Rutgers DAO that they set up, and two of the kids sent Solana to each other instead of Venmo. I was like, whoa, I'm putting money in there. That's it. That was the it moment for me. I had been waiting for that for a long time. It was like, when will it become Venmo? Solana, it looks like, does a good job at that because it's just so cheap to interact with. But I've become less bullish on DAOs in the last few months. I think LLCs just do fine. Partly DAOs are cool, but I don't know. I don't know if you've explored any of them since, uh, last time I saw you.

I haven't. I really haven't. Um, I don't know. Yeah, I really have— I haven't, I haven't opened an LLC in 5 years, I think. And I, I never really like— I just got the LLC because I thought that was what you needed to do. Like, it wasn't like Okay, I'm experiencing this problem now. Like, I should probably get an LLC, you know what I'm saying? So I don't really even understand, like, the— I can, like, outline the benefits of an LLC, but I haven't, like, experienced, like, wow, like, okay, this is, like, a good way to structure business, or, like, compared to a DAO or whatnot.

Got you.

Yeah.

Any, uh, anything on your mind? That we haven't covered?

Um, I'm curious about your thoughts on the future of freelance work in the Web3 space. Not necessarily like working as a freelancer for Web3 projects, but more so like what does freelance work look like in the future. I feel like I was reading— yeah, I was, I was, I was reading about something from— oh man, I'm totally blanking. There was some project that's do— that's working on this, and I looked into it and I was just like, this is just— I'm coming in way too late. There's too much shit going on. Like, I can't even like invest my time into like wrapping my mind around this. But I'd love to hear kind of like, as somebody who's been working in the space for a little bit, who's also like plugged into crypto, like, wait, what your thoughts are.

Yeah, I got paid $75 in Ethereum for a tweet last week. I was like, that was dope.

Wow.

Straight up for a tweet, just in Ethereum. He probably paid like $15, $20 in transaction fees because it was in Ethereum. He should have paid me in Solana, but that's not the point. The point is it was immediate. And I also don't know, it was for an anonymous account, so I don't know who paid me, but I know I got paid for that tweet. So I think that is the future of getting paid in Web3 is like these big anon accounts, they all have writers working for them, the big ones at least, and the Liquidities, the Ramp Capitals, the whatevers. They probably pay out in LLCs, and this guy was paying me via Stripe before, but just for the little tweet that I sent him, the idea, it's just like, "What's your ETH name?" And then he just sent it to me. It's kind of cool. So every time I have like an idea for a funny tweet, I just send it to him and then he sends me ETH. And I was like, that's pretty dope. I like that. As more, I guess, in the future also, I think continuously like writing and art will be important and design. Like we've seen, like designers are making good fucking money right now. They are killing it and Web3 needs UX. So I think designers and freelance designers are going to be winning in the next, right now and in the future, people who can make Web3 usable and less, exactly what punk6529 said, when people aren't talking about the MetaMask, the wallet and other the different bullshit about it, but when they're just talking about like the experience of using it, you know. But yeah, yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on that. Yeah.

Do you think there's going to be like a, like a marketplace almost in the future in some place? Like, I know that's— you want to decentralize. I know, I know, I know, but like Let's say for example, I don't know, there was some sort of job board and people could kind of like, I don't even know.

Yeah.

I probably need to think about it more.

Somebody tweeted about that the other day. Jack Raines commented, I thought, but it would just turn as like Upwork. I think like the beauty of making money on Twitter is it's just like nobody knows what's really going on. It's all in the fucking DMs. And that's what's crazy. And like, there's no, there's no job board telling you how much a thread costs. Like you just make that, like, I went off your number. Like, honestly, that's the only reason why I charged what I charged is I was like, ah, like I have less followers than Austin, so I'll charge a little less. And that was it. That was my whole process.

So funny.

I think that's the beauty of Twitter. It's so much more fun. It is. Yeah. I don't know if you've experimented with Bitcloud at all. It's interesting. It's like creator coins. Everybody has the creator coin. Now it's called DeSo, but I started building on there recently and getting very minor traction, but it's interesting. Your coin rises and falls based off the demand and supply for your coin. So I don't know about the mental health effects of that on teenagers in 10 years, but I think it's an interesting concept. Yeah. What do you think of Elon buying Twitter? What's your thoughts on that?

Oh man. All right. So this is another— you're opening up a can of worms.

Yeah.

So when he first announced it, I was like, holy crap, this is crazy. I was listening in on Twitter Spaces like all day, trying to understand like what people's thoughts were. There's this one thread that I came— that my friend sent me and it was written by, I'm blanking on the person's name, cuz it's like not someone that normally comes up in my Twitter feed, but he was like the ex-CEO of Reddit and he also has experience working on a few other like social platforms. And I think that he kind of really shaped like my thought or my idea around it. So I'll send it to you, but generally what I think and kind of what the thesis of this thread was, was that when you're managing like a— his thesis is that Elon Musk will not be able to like manage Twitter effectively. I think that he will be able to manage Twitter effectively. But this kind of gave me a little bit of background on like what is needed from a person in this position.

Right.

So I feel like we're in the best place. Like our Twitter circle is like the best place we could possibly be. Like if everybody was there, which is unrealistic, Twitter would be— and social media would just kind of be a much better place, I think. But the fact of the matter is, is that a majority of Twitter lies on, as is complaining about politics and they're complaining about this and that, and it can be very like divisive. And when, you know, major political or social events happen and there's a massive divide on social media and there's like an uproar from one side, an uproar from the other side, and then, you know, people are going back and forth and then results in digital violence and in-person violence and people are getting killed and bad shit is happening, the person that's in charge of this entity or this community needs to come in and be like, okay, we need to take that out. However, what's the most effective way to remove that so that people will stop hurting each other? And it's from the outside, it's like Twitter or this social media is picking spaces. They're, they're leaning left, they're leaning right. They're doing this, they're doing that. And like where you sit within that, I guess that line or just kind of like on that spectrum will determine and kind of like shape your, your views based on the way that the things that Twitter is like feeding you and whatnot. But I think that Elon's role is gonna, is gonna be more around kind of like, he's gonna, he, he's gonna like realize that, hey, like that, that's kind of what the case is. How do we deal with that? And I don't know. I didn't want to get like political with it at all, but I feel like that's kind of like, that just completely changed my thinking because at first I was like, this is dope. Like Elon's buying Twitter. And then I was like, what does it really take? And then I read this thread and I was like, holy shit, that's so true. And do I believe it 100%? Probably not, but it makes sense.

I don't know.

What are your thoughts?

No, I got you. I want Elon to buy Twitter, honestly. That's what I want. But I think somebody said this, but I'm stealing this idea, but it'd be great for Twitter, bad for Elon. I think it would make his life way worse. But this is the guy who does the hard things to make everybody else's life better. That's the kind of guy he is. But I think if you want anybody fixing or worrying about those problems of division and people hurting each other online or physically, you want the guy who has handled Tesla's smart or auto driving incidents and car crashes and all that kind of stuff. That's the kind of person that I'd personally want in charge of that. I don't know. I think that Elon would bring a lot of engineers to Twitter, kind of what Sahil Bloom said, also stealing his thought on that one. A lot of engineers would be like, "Oh, this is a top-rate place to go. This is top-notch. Maybe we won't just jump into Web3 where all the money is or where all the fun is, but we'll go to Twitter again." I don't know. I think that'd be good. So many new product features, so many new things could happen. And then for the decentralized algorithm, they already have that, what I was describing with Big Cloud/Disso. That is decentralized Twitter. You literally have your followers and everything all on a blockchain, and then there's 10 different Twitters or 10 different dApps, all these different apps that you can view it from, and your followers, your following, your content all imports. So it'd be like Facebook, Twitter, all your followers and following are all on the same thing. It's already there. And so big people use it like Dharmesh, the CEO of HubSpot, Pamela Anderson, weirdly, and her son. Other people, Chamath Sondar, Balaji is an investor. I don't know what's going to happen with that, but I don't know. I have no clue what'll actually happen, but if people want a decentralized Twitter, it exists. People obviously don't want it, otherwise it'd be booming. So I don't know. I think people want the centralized authority and they want Twitter to be Twitter. Um, I have no idea what'll happen, but I— dude, now I gotta write an essay about like the, the shit that goes on behind the scenes of Twitter, what we were talking about earlier, and that how that's the beauty of the Twitter economy, because that's like the fun— that's the fun part. Yeah, I don't want to reveal the— I don't want to take the mask off though, you know.

It's true.

Yeah, it's fun. All right, dude, I'm gonna grab some dinner, but let's try to chill in person soon. It's getting nice out.

Yeah, 100%.

Hell yeah, Dog Beach. Yeah.

All right. We have to go. All right, later.