#14: Kevin Esherick - Fashion NFTs, impactful books, and running through NYC

Just talking about how like there will always be more stuff that you want to do in a day in your life. Like you just got to accept like you're not going to accomplish everything you want, you know, like—

No, I refuse.

What's up? Welcome to another episode of Brain Blast. Today we got my boy Kevin Eschrich on. He is working on a really cool NFT project called Material. It's blending the real world of fashion with NFTs. He's got a pair of jeans that people write on, gets turned into NFTs. I'll let him tell you all about it. All right, enjoy.

Yo, yo.

What's good?

How we doing?

Good, man.

How are you? I'm good. The, uh, real quick, the audio or the, the video of this doesn't go live, does it?

Nah, dude, just audio. I'm not pretty enough for that.

I was gonna say, I would have had to put my makeup on.

Yeah, for real, for real. So what's been happening? How's, how's your adventure in New York? I saw you tweeting about that.

Um, dude, that was good, um, and bad. And it's all good material. So it's, I mean, it's, is this being recorded presently or I'm trying to figure out, okay. [Speaker:JASON_LEVIN] Yeah, yeah. [Speaker:JOSH_TAYLOR] What I can and can't say and what sorts of things to disclose to the public and whatnot. More salacious parts of my adventures in New York that Should remain concealed. It was, I mean, so it was super quick. It was like a sprint. I was up there for 30 hours. For those listening, I don't live in New York, but I like going up to New York a lot. It's where a lot of the tech world is, a lot of the art world, all that stuff. And it's only a hop, skip, and a jump from where I live. Where I'm located. But I, Friday night, I was staying at my friend's place and was not planning to go out. And then he convinced me to go out and I was really tired and ended up staying and hanging out with people until something like 4 in the morning, got dragged into going to a hookah bar, which I had no desire to do whatsoever. And then had to run home across the city at 4 in the morning and began— when I first started running, like, I thought I had my bearings and just was running in the complete wrong direction. And I was just like kicking myself. I'm like down on, uh, like all the way to the far end of the Lower East Side and had to get up, uh, back over to West Village.

Um, so why were you running?

Uh, just cause it was late at night. I wasn't going to pay for whatever would have, uh, an Uber or whatever it might've been. And, um, Yeah, in the end, like, running was going to be the fastest way of getting home. That's— that's— I have a tendency to do that when I'm like in cities. Um, if I want to get somewhere, I just run places. Um, I have like—

that's— dude, that's like a fucking, uh, Roman soldier or something, man. That's cool.

Yeah, I've never— up until this weekend, I had never really like encountered a friend who does the same thing. Um, for me, it's just kinda like, I'm like, well, like if I can keep it at a pace that's low enough that I won't show up to whatever event, like super sweaty, um, then I'm getting a little extra exercise in and I'm usually like moving around faster than transportation's gonna get me and for cheaper than it's gonna get me there. Um, but there's also like, the other side of it, which is where I'm chronically 3 minutes late to things. And a lot of times that puts me in a position where I need to run across cities. So like on my way out of New York, which also plays into what I had said about how New York was good and bad, I was running late for my bus back and I go down into the subway station and like, I thought it was going to be all good. And the next train on the 1, like isn't for 10 minutes, which is like pretty rare. Like I timed that poorly for it to be 10 minutes away. Um, and so I had to like run out of there and sprint 2 miles from there up to, uh, like north of Penn Station. Um, with my backpack on and everything like that. So sometimes it's by choice, sometimes it's not by choice. And I made it a minute before the bus was scheduled to depart. Of course it didn't depart at that time, but—

Were you wearing the jeans?

I was not because I was aware that there was a decent chance I was going to be late. And so I was like, I'm gonna hop out of these real quick. But on Friday night I was, and yeah, I was sweating and sweating in them a little bit.

All right, let's, let's talk about the project because I've seen some announcements, I've seen some, some shit. Let's hear about it.

Yeah, um, I mean, so you first encountered it back at ETH Denver when we met, uh, at whatever that, that like pub or whatever it was. Was with the Cabin DAO homies and Alina and whatnot. And that was pre-launch, you were in on some alpha and it's definitely matured a good bit by then. So that was like mid to late February. It was finally announced and launched mid-April. But the big idea is I'm working on an NFT conceptual performance art project called material, and the idea behind it is that the canvas is a pair of jeans that I wear around, and the artist is all the different people I come across. So in short, I made this pair of jeans, I wear them around, and when I meet people and connect with them in a certain way, or they leave an impact on me, We share a meaningful experience together. I don't know, we have a wild night or an interesting philosophical conversation about the nature of identity, like things like that. Like I'm touched in some way. I may invite them to add a piece to the jeans in the form of an illustration or like a bit of text, whatever. They feel would contribute to the canvas as a whole. So I bring these fabric markers around with me, and that's the usual medium by which they're adding these pieces. And the project originally, like, predated any NFT integration or anything like that. It's just like a fun way of engaging with people in social settings and exploring the bounds of what clothing can be and how we can interact around it and express our creativity And then it occurred to me that like all these people were adding dope shit to the jeans and I would like to reward them for that in some way. They're in some sense like artists contributing to this collaborative canvas. And so to enable them to capture some of the value that they're contributing to it, I decided NFTs could be a really interesting way of unlocking that. So now the project is officially live and anytime someone adds a piece, they get an NFT of the jeans in the state that they added to them. So including all the pieces prior to and the piece that they added so that it's their own unique one-of-one piece, the canvas that they put the cherry on top of and a digital time capsule pointing to the jeans as they existed at that moment in time. And so the piece that they're adding is kind of representative of the relationship that we share and the memory that we created together, but it also points to their shared ownership in this canvas. And so to actually enable them to not only have this digital keepsake, but to also meaningfully capture that value, the jeans are eventually going to go up for auction as an art piece along with the series of NFTs, and the proceeds will be distributed between myself and all the contributors.

So quick question, so for each NFT that you're giving somebody, are there— is it one edition that you mint and then send it over, or is it You mint 2 editions and then send 1 over and then you have your whole collection of them.

Good, yeah, you're paying sharp attention. I never know when to go into like these logistical details or not, but so yeah, 1 edition and the way it's then going to work, so like they're the owner of this NFT, I can't just auction it off. So the way it's going to work is they hold onto that And come time for the auction, they're going to have the choice as to whether or not to exchange their NFT to contribute it to the auction and receive an auction token in turn. And that auction token will then be able to be burned for their auction proceeds. So every individual artist will have the option to hold on to their own piece The royalty split will still be coded within each NFT, so they're not going to be getting a better split of the royalty by holding on to it, but they may want to hold on to it because they feel they can sell it at a higher premium than it would get in the auction, or they want to hold on to it as a personal keepsake, something like that. My hope is that, like, uh, for the sake of the art piece and just like the the ideal of like this community effort that everyone is going to cooperate and be willing to put them all up together. But I think it makes for an interesting social experiment to see how that's going to pan out. And because like I've developed rapport with each of these artists, like by virtue of the fact that they're on the jeans, that indicates that like we connected in some way. I feel like I will be able to, to just have conversations with people and show them what my vision is for having all of these in on the auction and convince them. But maybe we'll have some spicy drama where we have some stud artist on the jeans and he wants to go his own way with them or something like that. So yeah, but that in terms of the actual mechanics there, that's how it's going to work.

I would love to see you meet somebody like fuck Render or like someone very famous. And then they ask to draw on the jeans. You're like, nah, bro. Like, sorry.

No. I would love that too. I mean, if they're like a dick to me or something, then yeah, I'm not just gonna like, I'm not just gonna like do it for the clout. Like, you know, the jeans are supposed to be like a representation of my identity in that it's like pointing to the different people and places and experiences that have shaped me. And I know nothing about FuckRender, but if some random person is like, we don't click or anything like that, I don't really want to undermine the integrity of the project by just having some famous person on the jeans. I was recently at a club with David Dobrik, and obviously the dude has reach of, you know, millions upon millions of people. And afterwards, um, I was like, oh fuck, I totally should have like chatted with him or something. And then I was like, oh, like, what the fuck do I care about David Dobrik? Like, no, no offense to him or anything. I'm just like, I don't really know much about him other than that he's like mega famous. And maybe if we had sparked up a conversation, like, we really would have connected or something like that. Like, he could have valuably contributed. But yeah, it's not like a thing where I'm just like seeking out the most famous people I can to add to them or anything like that. That would be, I don't know, that just doesn't have like any artistic authenticity to it in my opinion.

No, it certainly doesn't, which is why I think it'd be funny if you tell them to go fuck themselves. So I know you're no stranger to experiments in general, like health experiments. Have you previously done performance art or social experiments in any way? I'll let you think about that for a question, like I, or for a second. I personally, like, I love to do bits. Like people don't know they're bits, but like, I'm just screwing around. Like I convinced a few friends that I was pro-Russia just to piss them off. And it was just so much fun.

But yeah. How long did you drag that on for?

A few minutes, 5, 10 minutes. And then they, they're like hammering about communism right there.

Yeah.

Oh, it was a great time. I had fun.

This was like post-invasion.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's a steamy one. That's fun. No, I love that sort of thing. I usually like, um, to answer your question, yes. Um, I feel like I would break. Yeah. I think I could keep up the rush a bit. As well for a little bit. But sometimes I like, I'm cringing on their behalf too hard where I like break, break character and just have to, have to say what's on my mind. But on the note of experiments, the even more experimental aspect of the project, two threads here I want to follow. So I'll first just explain a bit more of the project and how it is even more experimental. And that lies in a second piece of the idea of ownership that the members, the other contributors to the project have. So I listed the one where they have a real sense of ownership in the jeans and that they capture value from the sale of the jeans. They also have meaningful ownership in that they have control over the jeans in some way. So even though they no longer physically are holding on to the jeans, I'm returning some control back to them as creators of this canvas by enabling every NFT holder to become a part of the Material DAO, the DAO for the project, and they get a vote on real decisions in my life so that they are in choosing things for me, choosing things for the jeans. So, you know, they're from afar orchestrating where the jeans go, um, like where I travel, whether I say go to LA next weekend or something like that, what I do in them, um, who I meet with, things of that nature, um, so that they retain some creative control over where this project heads. And in that sense, I feel like even just the core mechanic of the project with the entities and stuff is rather experimental, but this is where it's really a social experiment in terms of playing with my behavior and things like that. So we actually just ran our first proposal and vote, which was something very simple, but just a little fun thing. I do a lot of social experiments or— sorry, not social experiments, but like personal health experiments on my own end, things like microdosing shrooms or turning off the lights in my apartment a couple hours before bed to more mimic like the natural cycle of light and dark that we would experience, uh, to help with my insomnia. And so I let them decide what my next personal experiment's going to be. And it was a contest between a 72-hour fast. So no food for 72 hours, which is something I've been meaning to do a while, and a 24-hour technology fast. They decided on the 24-hour tech fast. So sometime next week I will be off the grid for a full 24 hours, which doesn't sound like that much, but I haven't done that like really ever, probably. So I'm kind of excited for it and I'm actually going to use it to do, layer up another experiment. I frame everything as experiments, basically anything new that I do, I frame as an experiment because I, I record results from it. I compare it with some sort of control and things like that. And I think the framing of things as experiments is liberating in many ways. But so layering on top another experiment, which is a 1-day meditation retreat. Been meaning to get to that for a while. And so that's what I'll be doing. And then on the theme of your pro-Russia bit and just kind of more like quotidian social experiments and messing with people and doing bits like that. There was a point back in college where we had these awards among my like broader group of friends called the Dylan Dundees. Dylan was the name of the dorm that we were all in. It was this annual award show and we just come up with like ridiculous awards to give to people. And the writers were deciding between a couple of different awards to give to me. And one of them was most likely to use their friends as human guinea pigs. And I didn't even quite get it at the time, but apparently, yes, I do have it somewhat in my nature to like kind of subtly engage in human behavioral experiments that intrigue me, and I do it much more explicitly now.

Yeah, but that's fair. Yeah, I've been thinking and talking with my girlfriend about your project a bit. She's in fashion, she works at Burberry.

Oh shit, no way.

Yeah, yeah, I got my first Burberry jacket. It's fly as hell. Got us, got it on sale.

Put a— or I'll just Really quickly, the Burberry plaid, um, is— they share the same plaid as my, like, family tartan from my Scottish ancestry.

Just interesting fact.

Uh, the Thompson clan, it's our, our main plaid is like a light blue, um, but the hunting plaid, I think it is Or the funeral plaid, something like that is like, um, that beige color that Burberry uses. So anyways, anytime you don your Burberry jacket, um, I hope warm memories of me come to mind. Go on.

Of course. Um, I don't even know where I was with that. Oh, we were just talking about how, like, it sounds like— I'm going to be blunt. It sounds like you're creating a prison for yourself, man. Like, like losing control over decisions in your life. Like, For me, like, independent autonomy is, is like everything for me. Um, I couldn't imagine doing that. Like, how, how are you, are you just gonna say the Serenity Prayer over and over again, or what are you—

Yeah, pretty much. Great prayer.

Um, it's a good one.

Yeah, definitely creating a prison for myself in a certain way. Um, and individual autonomy is like crazy important for me. Like, I would say I rank very high on like the levels of individualism and things like that. Like, I— the thought of like working for someone else is like repugnant to me. And so even like at the expense of like, you know, not bringing in like like real income or things like that. Like I've just been off on my own for all of my adult career, you know, starting my own companies, doing freelance gigs, working on like a weird wacky art project, things like that. And I think that's really interesting. And that, that like, there's this tendency to want to do our own thing and be in control. And yet that's in tension with— in tension with my views on identity, in that I basically largely derive my views on identity from Buddhist philosophy and the idea of no-self. I think that we are all an aggregate of a bunch of different people and experiences and causes and effects that have been poured into us. And so this project is me taking like my really strong sense of individualism and basically questioning that, pushing back against that, um, and exploring like what happens when I let go. Like, I'm kind of a control freak, um, in that like I don't, I don't even like coffee. Um, I, I enjoy it like hell, but, uh, I don't like being dependent on anyone or anything else, even to the extent of not drinking coffee, which is like pretty unreasonable. Like, it's not a dependency that's really ever going to like betray me. It's not like coffee's gonna up and disappear one day or anything like that. Um, but I have like an anti-reliant, uh, character like that. And so I think it's, it makes for an interesting experiment to like take my life and, um, throw it into the hands of like all of these other people and see what happens, but also like having faith in them and like believing that they're not going to act maliciously against me because we have forged that connection. Um, and they're friends of mine. They're people who I've, uh, broken bread with. And I believe that like they are going to do what's in the best interest of me and in the best interest of the gene. And for the most part, I'm like, I'm not gonna allow them to just like do things that result in like my torture or something like that. Like if I like get in like a really good relationship or something like that, I'm not gonna just let them be like, yeah, yeah. Like we're cutting that shit off. You're not like, I don't know if they decide like the relationship's drawing me away from the genes or too much, so, or something like that. Like, I think that would be a line that we draw, but yeah, I'm excited to see how it develops over the course of the project. Yeah, the idea of loss of control and how in control are we really in the first place, and to what extent are we owners of free will and owners of ourselves, and what does ownership mean? And how is ownership distributed between people? These are all kind of questions that the project is bringing up and is an attempt to live out.

Yeah, no, it's super interesting. Yeah, back to writing for a sec, or starting with writing.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, freelance writing, I was doing it for 2 years. 2 months before I signed up for the full-time gig. And now due to conflict of interest, I am not freelance writing. So, which is interesting and I'm having fun. I like my work and I feel—

Were you taking on like just different clients when you were doing freelance? Yes. Or were you just saying it was your blog full-time?

No, no, no. I wish, man. Not yet, but no, I was working for Greg Eisenberg at Late Checkout, was doing a little bit for some prominent anon accounts. And yeah, an NFT collection I was writing threads for as well. Yeah, yeah, it was—

Was this all Twitter DM stuff?

Yeah, all Twitter DMs, yeah. So I actually, I quit my job at Amex before I got my offer at my current job, 'cause I was doing good freelancing. I was like, screw it, I'm just gonna go all in on freelancing. And then the next day I got the full-time offer. It was like, ah, never mind, I'm good. And it worked out. I'm happy. Yeah.

What compelled you to join them as opposed to sticking with—

Yeah, I mean, Defiant is just like, it's almost like the Vice of crypto. Vice News. And I've always had shit. Yeah.

Since I was like, I'm not that familiar with them. I know I've like read some of their stuff, but That characterization interests me. Like, Vice, especially like in the early days, doing like some cool raw shit.

Like, yeah, their YouTube channel's popping. It's— they do some amazing stuff.

Um, okay.

And I, I wouldn't say they go out there and document, uh, cannibals or something like Vice does, or like something insane, but, uh, they don't know how many crypto cannibals there are, but there's probably more crypto cannibals than you'd think, honestly. Like, just thinking about the— yeah, all right, I could go on about that. But yeah, it's just—

of the world.

Yeah, yeah. Think about, like, there's a lot of people who like full, like, control libertarian in crypto. They don't want to be— they don't want to listen to the rules. Why do they have to listen to the rule about eating people?

It's just a rule. Higher than average prevalence among crypto enthusiasts.

Crypto cannibalism, that's I'm going to write an essay about that, definitely. But yeah, it was just a really good offer. Camila, my boss, is just brilliant. She wrote a book about Ethereum that's getting turned into a movie.

Whoa.

Yeah, she's cool.

Is that the story behind Ethereum?

Yeah, so the story behind all the hackers and Vitalik of Ethereum.

They should have Nicolas Cage play Vitalik.

That'd be beautiful. I want— there's no doubt in my mind Timothée Chalamet will be Vitalik.

And oh yeah, that works.

That works almost too well, actually. Like that. Yeah, it's kind of scary. But where have you been doing writing? Uh, if you're, if you're allowed to say, if you're not doing too much ghost.

But yeah, um, a big one I definitely can't say. Um, Trying to think through On Deck. I did a good deal. I think I'm allowed to say them. My name isn't on any of the pieces, but I believe that's still okay for me to say. I was doing like content stuff for them, helping to write like founder stories or pieces on companies that came out of On Deck that had just raised around And I was doing things for them here and there through like, from like May through end of November of last year, something like that. And then I got super wrapped up in the crypto world and did a little bit of stuff for some DAOs here and there. One of which was Houses of Rome, formerly known as Rome DAO. They were originally kind of billed as an OHM fork, but that was really kind of just like a hype wave that they were riding. And what they're really building is like a crypto metaverse game with their own token that serves as the foundation for their metaverse economy. And so the game is like this Roman-themed online strategy game, I guess, kind of similar to Risk, but with cool 3D graphics and stuff like that. And you can— it's like the gameplay mechanics incentivize different positive economic behaviors. Like you stake your tokens, like for staking your tokens, You can get troops in exchange that you can then use in battle. And then for participating in battles, you win certain NFTs and they're building an NFT marketplace where those will be able to be traded and things like that. A friend from On Deck is their lead front-end engineer, I believe. And he had kind of gotten me involved and I did some writing stuff for them for a good little while and more just like even beyond just like doing actual work for them, I was just like getting neck deep. I don't know. I didn't want to say balls deep, but I guess it's too late for that now. Yeah. All good. I had previously been like unexposed to DeFi and I just did like a deep dive into DeFi alongside doing this writing for them and stuff. And so it was a really interesting experience. But—

No, that's great. I kind of have an unpopular opinion about DAOs.

Sure.

Just like they are gig— DAO workers are the gig workers of Web3. They're just the gig workers. Unless you're a core contributor, you're basically doing DoorDash. At least in my experience with most of the startups—

DoorDash, but you're paid in an asset that you're going to need to pay capital gains taxes on, or at least usually, but also an asset which then aligns your incentives such that it is conducive to the success of the company for you to do well, and thus there's a reciprocal relationship there. Your quality work helps the company do better, the company do better helps the token price, et cetera. Yeah, it's a really kind of chaotic scene right now, I think, at least in my experience. And I think you've worked with DAOs that are more mature than at least the ops side of the ones I was working with, but it's the Wild West right now. It's early on, but it is going to become a gig thing of sorts for sure. It's just that hopefully some of what the Web2 gig economy's flaws were, where gig workers have no connection to the companies they're working with, and so there's all the incentive in the world to fudge your hours and do shitty work and stuff like that. Hopefully some of those things will be smoothed out by like the incentive alignment that token payment confers, but we'll see. It's early days and it's all really interesting stuff, but it's a bit chaotic. And working in that environment was a lot for me. I like having my mind like on one thing and one thing only. And like, trying to bring in money through a few different DAOs. First of all, a few different streams is just chaotic enough for me as is, but then a few different DAOs, which are chaos at the moment anyways, these basically fucking anarchic organizations. I mean, it depends on the DAO, but for DAOs who are decentralization maxis, it's going to be pretty anarchic in how they operate. And yeah, It was a lot of chaos. So I think there's a lot of growing to do.

[Speaker:JASON_LEVIN] No, I couldn't agree more. I saw somebody tweet like, "When are we going to start talking about the boring things with DAOs, like 401(k)s and just health benefits and that kind of stuff?" And yeah, I mean, I think it's necessary if DAOs are actually going to be a real part of our future, and I think they will be. I still think it's a cool concept. I just Yeah, no, I'm the same way, like taking income from multiple places and like, dude, after I stopped writing for Cabin DAO, I wasn't on Discord for like 3 weeks and it was same. I got, I got so much writing done and it was amazing.

Yeah. And yeah, I hardly touch Discord anymore. It's awesome.

It's yeah, I could actually think.

Yeah. I want to see something that replaces it that isn't such hell. Um, like, it, it's, I guess, the best tool out there right now for what it's doing, but it was— it's so frenetic. It, like, it raised my blood pressure, like, permanently. Like, for the rest of my life, my blood pressure is raised 2 points or something like that. Um, yeah, yeah, I want to see something better come out. I know, um, Commonwealth is working on something along those lines. Shout out Commonwealth. I have a friend who's an engineer there, but I haven't explored their tool, so I can't really advocate for it. Yeah. When did you leave? When did you stop writing for Cabin?

I guess a few months ago. I started getting paid opportunities that were just a little better and needed less approval. Like with Cabin Dow, there was a review process for every article, like 7 people needed to review things. And it was just, yeah, I was working with like, you know, Greg and CEOs that like, you're just like, cool. Like, great.

Yeah. Actually got this picture here from, I don't know how blurry it is or not, but it's the Polaroid you took at the cabin meetup we hung out at, uh, in Denver.

Nice cabin.

Alina, and I don't know who that other girl is, but yeah, very cool, very cool. Good people. I enjoyed hanging out with them all.

Yeah, I still think everybody's awesome. Like, I have no beef or anything. I just, I think, yeah, it's more fun working one-on-one with somebody than, yeah, one-on-seven.

Um, yeah, same with Rome. I should clarify, Houses of Rome, I believe the team is like phenomenally talented. And they're building something really cool. And they're like one of the smarter and more productive teams I've come across in the Web3 world. But just like for me and my personality, it's like, I really don't like doing work at someone else's behest. And then the DAO environment was just a little chaotic for me. And I stumbled across this opportunity with Material. And so I just kind of wanted to go all in on that. And there's just like a greater peace of mind when all of your being is like concentrated around a single endeavor. And yeah, it's nice to be working on one thing for me.

That's beautiful. Switching topics a bit, have you been reading anything good?

Yes. Well, yes and no. I don't read at all. I listen to audiobooks nonstop.

Okay, um, so I knew that was coming.

Really?

Well, I knew you— I know you like books, so I figured I was like, oh, okay, he listens to audiobooks or he like just absorbs them via osmosis.

But I don't know, I just hold one in my back pocket at all times. Yeah, I, I just— I tend to not make time to read physical books these days. Um, I'm basically just waking up and working from like when I wake up till when I go to bed with breaks here and there to like take care of my health. I never sacrifice that. I meditate every day. I exercise every day. I eat good. And I get my sleep. I don't shortchange on those things. And so I feel like every other hour of the day. I kind of just need to pour into working. And but I'm still able to like make marked progress on books through audiobooks. I listen— I eat 2 meals a day. Each takes like 40-ish minutes, something like that, from starting cooking to cleaning the last dish or whatever, 40, 45. And so I'm able to, I just spend that time focusing pretty intently on the audiobooks. And right now I'm listening to Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's so far over the course of this year, I've read all of the rest of his books or listened to, and I really, really like them actually. I think he pisses a lot of people off because He's anti-crypto pretty much from what I understand, and he's just kind of an asshole. He throws shade at a lot of intellectuals who I respect on Twitter, but he's really smart and he's an actual thinker and has a lot of ideas that are against the grain and not just against the grain for the sake of being so, but have actual merit to them. And I really appreciate that about him. And so I've been enjoying that. I'm going to check my list real quick because I feel like I just finished something else. But how about you?

Yeah, wait, on Taleb for a second. Yeah, I haven't blocked on Twitter. He's so annoying. He's really— but so brilliant. My friend sends me his best quotes. My buddy's like a hedge fund guy, which is one what Taleb was and yeah, you know, it's some of his favorite stuff, but you know, Taleb, like he says some crazy shit, but he's so math-based in his like thinking that it all makes sense because it has to, it's rational. But I just finished a really good book that I needed personally. I was like all over the place, kind of switching jobs and new relationship and all this stuff. And I just read 4,000 Weeks. Um, by Oliver Burkeman, I want to say.

Yeah, yeah, good things about that.

Yeah, I think I heard about it from the Tim Ferriss Show, but, um, just talking about how like there will always be more stuff that you want to do in a day in your life. Like, you just got to accept like you're not going to accomplish everything you want, you know?

Like, no, I refuse.

Yeah, I know, I'm just—

I'm gonna do it all, I swear to you.

I know, I know, I'm this— I'm the same way, but, um It's like, all right, like if I don't get everything done in this week or whatever, this life, so it goes. Like, ah, just trying to make peace with that. But also there was a big thing on there, which is kind of what you're talking about, where it was like, I have trouble with this personally, but so say I have like 3 focuses, you know, like podcast, Brain Blast, and work, work, you know? And then I have like a bunch of other interests that are just like Photoshop, I like was trying trying to make NFTs and screwing around. I was like, these are all things that I love. And like, yeah, but I can't like waste my time on that stuff. Cuz it'll take me away from like the 3 important things, you know? And so he is talking a lot about that. Just like sometimes you have to do the things that you can't do, things that you want, even though like they're good things, like they're great things, but like they're just, they're not as good as writing or not as good as reading, you know? It's like, It's, it's something that I've always kind of struggled with and I'm doubling down on this year, I guess.

Yeah, it's a really, really tough pill for me to swallow. I'm like in love with like everything in the universe and want to like gobble it all up. And there's just so much interesting shit out there that I want to consume in this short life. And it's impossible. And yet I'm still like flinging myself into all these different things, hoping that, that, I don't know, it'll end up happening or I'll unlock something that enables infinite productivity. But yeah, it really just needs to be that like, for me, it only ever can calm down a bit when I get so obsessed with one thing that while the others are all still incredibly compelling to me, that one's just like so far leads ahead that I'm able to like turn my head away from them for a little bit, which fortunately I've found for the time being, but it's really tough. I wanna do everything.

No, I definitely understand.

And this, you know, the world we live in like is designed to just aggravate that tendency. Like we're exposed to every stimulus the world has to offer. So all of these wonderful things are being shoved in our faces. And it's like, it's a unique kind of beautiful hell.

Um, yeah, but yo, you mind if we jump back to sleep for a second?

And yeah, yeah, I know, real quick, real quick, because I did check my book list, I would just like to briefly plug The Dawn of Everything and, uh, Democracy in America. I— those are two that I read pretty recently and was really impressed by. The Dawn of Everything, like different lane than most of a lot of what I've read recently. It's by David Graeber and David Wengrow. David Graeber was like an anarchist sociologist who died last year, a couple years ago, but basically like rewrites human history from the perspective of throwing out a lot of our common narratives and looking— instead of looking at history from the perspective of the writers of the victor society, looking at Indigenous voices and things like that, and the different forms of social organization over time, and whether history really is this linear trajectory of increasing complexity and moving toward democracy and things like that, or if that's not the case at all, and maybe people in Central America 2,500 years ago had egalitarian social structures figured out. I really like reading things that come from people who think differently than myself. But for that, it was really interesting, and I felt opened my mind up a lot and introduced me to a lot of history that I wouldn't have otherwise been acquainted with. And then Democracy in America, kind of like a cool counterpoint to that. De Tocqueville is just an absolutely brilliant thinker. I actually wasn't expecting that to be the case so much, but he's— I wasn't expecting it to be bad. I mean, it's like kind of a classic, but yeah. He's quite profound.

Nice. Nice. I'm reading, I just started another book that you might like actually. So I'm not that deep in it, but the 400-Year History of Capitalism in America.

The 4, the 4-0-0 is recurring in your life.

Yeah. Hey.

That's 2 books.

Yeah. It's by Bhoo Srinivasan. I don't think any relation to biology, but same as—

Okay, cool.

But yeah, it starts out with like, yeah, it starts out with Jamestown and everything. And I'm trying to just find patterns with this crypto stuff and NFTs and like try to find patterns in history.

Oh, awesome.

I was looking into art history, but I figured I should look into other kinds of history first.

Yeah. Does Boo come at it from a certain ideological standpoint? Graber pretty unapologetically comes at it from like an anarchist, uh, like anti-Western capitalism standpoint. Yeah.

Yeah. So he immigrated from India with his family when he was a kid and was able to grow up and have a successful life and do all these things because of capitalism, he felt. And so I would say he's definitely pro-capitalism, but you know, I don't think he's ignorant of the negative sides as well.

Sure. Sweet.

Yeah. But jumping back to sleep.

Yeah.

Insomnia. What is that like? And how do you get through that? Like, if I can't fall asleep for like 10 minutes, I get pissed off for like 20 minutes.

Like, I just— Oh, it's such a frustrating experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you do?

Yeah. So there are like 2 kind of major branches of insomnia. There's sleep onset insomnia and sleep maintenance insomnia. So having a hard time falling asleep, having a hard time staying asleep. For me, the one that has been an issue for me is sleep onset insomnia. Sleep maintenance, when I fall asleep, I tend to be pretty good. But for some periods of my life where I've had particular anxiety or things like that, that hasn't really been an issue. Sleep onset, yeah, it's like most of my life it's taken me unaided by engaging in sleep rituals and interventions and such. It's taken me a good hour to fall asleep consistently, often pushing up to 2 or 3 or whatever. And I guess as I got older, I started to realize that wasn't that normal. I would hear friends tell me they fall asleep in 5 minutes or 15 minutes or something like that. And yeah, it's incredibly frustrating, like you said, because it's— especially for someone like yourself or myself who are I really enjoy like autonomy. And if I can translate that over to control, which I know in my case I can, like sleep is the one thing that you like can't accomplish through deliberate intent almost. Like, yeah, the whole thing is that you need, yeah. Yeah. Like, like similar to meditation in a certain sense, but meditation, you can more effort your way, or at least in some styles of meditation. You can more like through the cultivation of intention achieve success with, with sleep. It's just like, nope. Like you just gotta not do kind of, and like lax in your, like your default mode network or prefrontal cortex or whatever it might be. That's, that's active. That's keeping you up. So the fixes that I've found, Just keeping a really strong routine. I go to bed at like almost the same time every night, like within a 30-minute window. And that includes weekends for the most part. Obviously this Friday night, this past Friday night, as I mentioned, did not fall within that, but I stay up late. So that's, I've always been a night owl. And since I work my own hours, I can On weekdays, I can go to bed at 1:00, 1:30, and that's fine because I don't have anyone to answer to in the morning for the most part. But then the nice thing is like Friday, Saturday night, I may be out till 1:30, 2:00, but that's not too far off my bedtime. So maintaining that routine like day in, day out has, has helped. A consistent eating schedule. Not eating several hours before bed. I do intermittent fasting. So, I don't eat for approximately like 5 hours or so before bed. And I think that helps me fall asleep more easily. Once you adjust to it, like once that like late night sensation of hunger is something that no longer really irks you. There's, I think, like the process of your body not digesting anything. And probably like lower blood glucose levels helps, helps you enter sleep. As I mentioned earlier with the experiments, the turning out of the lights actually has been a big one for me. I think that has been the single most impactful intervention that I've done. And some nights that'll be like, lighting a candle in my apartment. So I don't know, it's kind of mimicking this like hunter-gatherer ideal fireside existence. But even so with just like the lights out in my apartment, I can still see well enough to get around. And that doesn't mean that I'm not using my devices. I, because I do tend to work up until bedtime, those are still on, but I have brightness down to just about zero. And I have Flux on, on my computer and Night Shift on my phone to like minimize blue light and get it as dim as possible. And then I think a regular meditation and exercise routine has been helpful as well. And then, oh, ASMR, honestly.

Oh yeah.

A lot of people are weird. Weirded out by ASMR, I have found it to be like very, very helpful for me. Just like soothing at like a physiological level, like the experience of having like, some people are just non-responders to ASMR. It's like a pretty understudied phenomenon. We don't quite yet know why, but like having someone whisper at you like this, or like these hand motions, like the hand motions really get me. Like when they do like, yeah, if I have someone on the other end of the camera, like playing, like, like, like doing like a doctor, like role play. It sounds weird, but like, it's very, very calming for me. And the, the theory that I subscribe to for why it's so effective is that it mimics intimacy. And an intimate context is one in which we can be safe and relaxed. And the whispering and the movements up close near your face in this very vulnerable space are these symbols of intimacy. And also, there's a theory that it's like, kind of mimicking like grooming behaviors to make it like pleasant for us to groom one another in our, I guess, a little bit more distant ancestral past to get bugs off and shit.

Yeah, I could feel, see it being close to like infancy as well. Like, you know, when you're being, when you're a baby, like people play with your, or like go like that.

Yeah. From that. Yeah. Yeah. It could be like a developmental thing like that, but for whatever reason, like if I, if I get in bed and I hit that like 10-minute point, like you mentioned where it's just like, fuck, like I'm wound up. I can usually kind of tell like, okay, my brain's in that mode where it's like, it's in a self-perpetuating like thought spiral where the thoughts are going to keep coming and they're not necessarily bad thoughts, but like I'm in kind of like this excitable state. And I'll be like, okay, maybe time for ASMR if sleep's not going to come easily tonight. And then I'll like sit up and listen to and/or watch one of those for maybe 15 minutes or so. And that's usually enough for my eyes to start getting heavy. Shout out to GB. Gibi's my go-to. She's been my homie for a good few years now. Really like her videos. But yeah, nice.

Yo, so I gotta, I gotta get going and prep. I have a call soon after this, but it's been awesome talking. And I'm moving to New York in August.

Oh shit, let's go.

So yeah, next time you're in the city, let me know.

Awesome. Yeah. How far are you from there at present?

Not too far. It's like a 45-minute train ride.

Okay. I'll be back up there at some point in May. So—

All right, cool.

Maybe we can link up then. Yeah.

Are you going to NFT NYC or anything?

When is that?

June, mid-June, I want to say. Or— Yeah, sometimes.

I don't know. I have no mid-June plans as of present.

I think I might go but not buy tickets. Like, okay, just go.

A lot of people are doing that.

Yeah, yeah, like stay at my girlfriend's place and hang out with friends and say hi to everyone.

So, oh word, she lives there?

Yeah, yeah, she lives in New York.

Yeah, so yeah.

Okay, all right dude.

Yeah, well thanks for having me on.

Yo, this has been awesome and good just catching up a little bit.

Um, I feel like we need to do a little more catch-up where it's not mainly about me and I can hear a little bit more about what's going on in your life and relationship and the new job and everything. So for sure. All right, let's just talk to you soon. All right, see you, Jason Levin.