#18: Jason Levin - F*ck You Money, digital immortality, and getting hired in web3

I think to answer the question of how you get a job in Web3, it's build yourself a permissionless portfolio, take advantage of free resources and hustle like crazy. DM people, do what you got to do and make it happen. Okay. Welcome to another episode of Brain Blast. Today is going to be a little bit different. I was not able to get a guest this week for the first time in, I guess, 17 weeks or so. So I am going to be interviewing myself. That's right. Jason Levin will be interviewing Jason Levin. Very Childish Gambino style of me. Yeah. So a friend, a Twitter friend named Avantika Mera made a list of 100 questions on Substack recently, I guess. A few months ago, so I cut it down and made my own questions. I have about 5 questions and yeah, we're going to go through, I guess, 5 to 7, maybe, maybe if we have some time, some questions and I'll be giving some answers. Yeah, I just want to make it clear that this work is separate from my work at The Defiant and let's go. All right. Number 1. What is my fuck you money? What is my fuck you followers? All right, so fuck you money, if you're not familiar with the concept, is an idea posed by Antonio García Martínez, a founder and writer. And so basically it's the amount of money you have where you could just walk away, say fuck you to everything and, you know, do your own thing. You don't have to listen to anybody. You know, I think billionaires like Cuban who does whatever he wants, Chamath, whoever. For me, it's definitely less. I don't think I have a firm number. It's really whenever I can, like, I guess a few months ago, it was just the idea, like, whenever I can write full-time. So I'm already doing that full-time, but I guess furthermore, you know, fuck you money and fuck you audience or fuck you followers kind of thing. Whenever I could write for myself full-time, so do my Substack full-time, turn that into selling books and writing books. I already worked on one. Hint, hint. And then also, you know, having an audience where I could turn the books into movies, getting whoever I want on my podcast, having great conversations, going on other people's podcasts. Just for me, it's really the ability to have time where I can just spend every day writing, researching, reading, having coffee with friends. That's, that's all I really want in my life. And I've gotten that down to some degree. I just want to I want to keep going on that. And, you know, I feel like I'm not that far away, honestly. So it's going well. I love my work. And, you know, I'm going to keep doing that even when I have the fuck you money, fuck you followers. I enjoy writing about Web3, so I will keep doing that as well. Yeah. All right. So number 2, what is the best way to continue my Twitter account after I'm dead? So this is something that I've thought about like multiple times and it's kind of weird. I'm only 24, but, um, I don't know. I wrote a story for Greg Eisenberg at Late Checkout about an anon account that was passed down to his son or a friend or whatever after the owner of the anon account died. And the cool part about that is you have no idea, um, which anon accounts on Twitter or Instagram or whatever are actually run by their original owner. The original owner could have been dead or, or whatever and, and just pass it down, or he could have sold it. So I guess there's two possible ways to have my Twitter account run after I'm dead. I guess I should, yeah. So the first one would be on a scheduling app that would take you know, a very long time to schedule it for the next 5, 10 years and whatnot and just keep that going, which is definitely difficult and may require an executive assistant to help out with that. And the second way is passing it down to a friend or family member. You know, hopefully when I die, I'm old, I have grandchildren, I have children who might be able to do it or help out. Not really sure. But I guess the point, the reason why I want my Twitter account going past my life as a writer, there's this saying where it's like, you die the moment nobody talks about your name. And maybe that's the attention-seeking attitude of writers, but I honestly think it's more just, I want my work to keep going. Like, there are quote pages for Jack Kerouac, there's quote pages for Vonnegut and all my favorite writers, Shakespeare, whatever. I'm not actually a huge Shakespeare fan, but there's, you know, there's quote pages for them. I want that for myself. I want my writing to keep going after I die. And you know, this was something I thought about. My grandfather was a writer. He wrote all sorts of books, had them published in Barnes Noble, whatever. And, you know, after he died, I started converting some of these paperback books into Amazon Kindle books. And it's been cool to see, you know, income coming in. So, I imagine, you know, after I die, my Twitter account could still be used by my children and grandchildren to provide for them and sell books or newsletter or whatever. So I'd really like to provide that and be able to give them something more. All right. Number 3, this is a really cool question. Not to toot my own horn or anything because I came up with it myself, but how do I optimize my life for serendipity? So serendipity to me is running into friends at coffee shops, getting introduced to people with cool careers just randomly, getting set up on dates, etc. So for me, like, I currently live in New Jersey, but my girlfriend lives in New York on the Upper West Side. And so I mooch off her a lot and spend a lot of time in New York and I don't know, right now it's kind of strange. Like in New Jersey, I can just walk around New Brunswick where I live and I'll run into friends everywhere. You know, I've been there for 2 and a half years and it's a very small town. So if I go into the photo store, walk by the photo store, I'll see the guy who works there, Carl, who like him and I have a good talk every time. You know, we don't hang out, but it's that nice transient friendship that you just run into somebody. So I really enjoy that, or going down to the coffee shop and I'll see my friend John, or going wherever and I'll run into people. And so I'll be moving to New York in August, which I'm very excited about. And New York's obviously a much bigger place, but definitely looking forward to making it my own and for a long time and forming those relationships. So I think to optimize for serendipity and the idea of running into people, it's really getting involved with the community, getting to know people. You know, giving a shit and being kind to people who, who you wouldn't expect to be part of your life, like whether it's the doorman or, or the person who works at Starbucks or whatever. And then those relationships, you know, it's not like you hang out with people after, but, you know, it's nice to run into people. And then also just, I guess, hanging out with friends a lot and running into them. But then for the second part, getting introduced to people with cool careers. I didn't mean to, but I guess I've done this accidentally. But being a journalist, especially in crypto, I interview founders, analysts, all sorts of people every single day. And whether I'm introduced to them via our founder, Camila, or just DMing them via Twitter, it's pretty wild. Like a very big podcaster business person DM'd me this morning because of a threat that I wrote. And so I feel like Twitter has just opened up my world. It is amazing. Whether people are DMing me or I'm DMing them, I just end up having conversations with really brilliant people. And to me, opening up that serendipity is actually getting off the DMs and hopping on a phone call or hanging out in person if you happen to be available. And I think that's where the real friendships and relationships are formed and you know, if somebody's going to introduce you to a friend, they want to make sure you're dope. They want to make sure that you are actually worth introducing to. So the only way to know that is by actually hopping on a phone call and seeing who somebody is and seeing if they're reliable and trustworthy. And so I think the best way to do that is actually just getting off Twitter, having a phone call, meeting up in person, like meeting up with Twitter friends has been such a fun experience and it's definitely helped grow my audience, grow my friendships. Friendships, like, help me grow as a person in general and just feel like I have friendships and bonds that, you know, I can really trust people. So I'm going to pause real quick, grab some coffee. Next question. How do you strike a balance between investing in the world versus investing in yourself? So this is super interesting. There was a time in my life where I wanted to go into nonprofit. I worked at one for a bit. I wanted to help people for a living. And I think I do now as a writer. I help people understand Web3. I help grow, grow ideas. I help all that sort of stuff, but I'm not actively helping people. I have friends who are social workers, psychologists, et cetera. And I have the utmost respect for them, but they definitely make 30 to 40 grand less than me and struggle to get by. And I really think providing for yourself is is more important, especially at my age. I like to be able to live on my own and have a stable footing. And, you know, my end goal of all this, building an audience, all this stuff, is to help people, you know, and be able to help people with my writing and tell more stories from my life that I can't really tell until I have a bigger audience and can afford to, you know, and until I have that fuck you money that I just talked about. So I really think some of my stories will help people. I've already gone into some of them about, you know, leaving Michigan and taking time for myself and dealing with depression and all that stuff. But there's definitely some deeper stuff. So investing in the world, I think, can be done even if you have like a finance job or writing or whatever, where you're not like a social worker or whatever. I think it'd be done on the side. You know, I volunteer occasionally. I don't do it too often. I'm not some kind of saint, not trying to virtual signal here or whatever, but donating, volunteering, all that kind of stuff. Also just mentoring, mentoring people on Twitter, friends, helping out. Also just helping out other writers, you know, paying for their Substack, you know, and just being kind or paying for products, you know, investing in the economy is actually investing and helping other people. You know, despite the anti-capitalism out there, like, that is one way that you are able to help other people is by paying for things. All right, let's go into the second, or I guess the fifth question at this point. How do we design and write for Web3? So this is a question I actually asked last night. I moderated a panel for the Defiant with 4 founders in Web3, and one of the guys there, Jack, was a— he's a designer for a startup startup called Seasons. And so I asked him, how do we design for Web3? How do we make it simple? And I guess I answered my question there, but the idea is to make it simple. The idea is to make things friendly. Right now, Web3 is very tricky. It's very scary for people. There's hacks, there's scams, there's phishing, there's all sorts of stuff. Even some of the most brilliant people I know have been hacked for thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And You know, I've fallen for scams and fortunately haven't lost more than a few thousand. Not going to lie. That was more of a user error. But again, so I think it's making things simple, making things easy to understand. Web3 is extremely technical and most of the world is not extremely technical. So I was looking at statistics yesterday. There's only about $500,000 or 500,000 active Ethereum wallets daily. Right now. And so I think that really shows like, you know, there's 7 billion people in the world and only 500,000 people are actively using Ethereum, actively buying NFTs, et cetera. So I think to get where we want to be, we just got to make things super simple and we got to have the gateway drugs to Web3. So the Web2 stuff has to link there. We've already been seeing that with NFTs on Twitter, NFTs on Instagram, You know, but the other things needed as well, like YouTube's super great for that with influencers, but it doesn't really have Web3 linked in there. Maybe eventually with, I don't know, crypto tipping or subscriptions or whatever, who knows? But I think, you know, as a writer, I try to make things extremely simple, which means I have to understand them and people have to explain shit to me like I'm like a 5-year-old. That's what I tell people, literally. It's like, explain shit to me like I'm 5. I need to understand this like I'm an idiot because technically, like, I am an idiot. Like, I do not know how to code or deep stuff in Web3 like some of these people. Like, I really don't get it. I have no idea what a zero-knowledge proof actually is. I sort of understand that it's for security purposes, but I couldn't tell you the cryptographic understanding of it. So I try to make things understandable to a very, like, a simple degree. But I also, you know, I never assumed that the audience is stupid. I think people are smart enough to figure things out. You gotta be somewhere in between. It's a very difficult thing. All right, next question. This is a question from one of my, a Twitter follower, a new follower, valleyboy.eth. He asked, when did people start caring about my work? And adding on top of that, how do you get a job in Web3? So this is a great question and something I'm writing about, publishing a piece tomorrow. I've been losing on the internet for over 10 years. Definitely. I've, I posted YouTube videos in middle school, went to a VFX, like a video effects summer camp, trying to learn how to make dope YouTube videos. Made some cool stuff, never, whatever. High school, I started a YouTube channel with friends. We never went viral, so we stopped. And then at college, I started a music blog, interviewed some famous musicians, but we didn't know how to make money, so I stopped. And then there's more stories, you know, all these sorts of things where I started and stopped and then Finally, I got patient and in the last year or two years, I don't know if it was COVID or whatever, just seeing that, you know, I was able to do things in my life if I took my time. And so I think that really goes for people caring about your work too. Like nobody, even now, like I still think most people don't care about my work. I mean, that's true. Like most people in the world do not, but even in my circle, like A lot of people, a lot of my friends, family, not necessarily read my work, but there's people on the internet who pay to read my work, who pay me every month or pay me every year to read my work. And that's a beautiful feeling. I get paid to write. People care about my voice. People care about my writing. And that's incredible to me. So I guess I started on Twitter, started building, I guess, a year ago now about about 11 months ago, 12 months ago. And so it took me, I guess, 8 to 9 months, 10 months to actually start building traction. And I didn't really have my first viral thread or blow up and get more followers until 2, 3 weeks ago or a week ago. So it took a long time, a lot of trial and error, 15 to 20 threads bouncing around between niches for the first few months and, and finally finding and jumping down the rabbit hole of Web3. So I guess for me it was like as soon as I started really caring about my work and really caring about Web3 and going deep into this stuff and meeting people and people seeing just I was genuine about this, genuinely curious and genuinely interested in. And once I started putting like another level of effort in my work, people started caring a lot more. Moving into that, how do you get a job in Web3? So this is a great question and I've done multiple freelance jobs, 3 or 4 at this point, and now a full-time job in Web3. And I guess, how do you get a job? So I wrote a piece called Digital Apprenticeships and this is how I got one. I don't have a college degree. I did not graduate. I don't have an Ivy League or whatever. And so for me, there's no golden ticket into Coinbase or whatever, like at Yale or at Harvard or whatever, you know, so I had to hustle my way in. So for me, that was building a Twitter audience, building a portfolio via a newsletter, you know, freelancing, getting odd jobs here, getting paid, you know, $100 or $150 for an article and working. And so for me, that just really came from showing that I can write via my own newsletter and then DMing others. And getting jobs and like all of, all of my first few jobs on Twitter were via Twitter DMs and you know, finally I had a resume enough where I could go apply for a job and people are like, oh shit, like, yeah, this guy's legit. He's done work with Late Checkout and Bored Elon Musk and all this stuff. And so it took a lot of work, a lot of time, but I think anybody can really do it if they settle on what they want to do and build themselves a portfolio. That shit is permissionless. Building a portfolio is permissionless. You can do whatever you want on the internet. Most things are basically free. Substack is free, Figma is free, all this stuff is free to do. So if you're not taking advantage of it, like, you will be losing, and you can't be mad if somebody else is winning when they're taking advantage of the free resources. So I think to answer the question of how you get a job in Web3, it's build yourself a permissionless portfolio, take advantage of free resources, and hustle like crazy. DM people, do what you gotta do and make it happen. All right, I hope everybody enjoyed these questions. While I kind of just spat off answers off the top of my head, they've been in my head flying around for the last few months, 6 months, a year, even more. Really been thinking about a lot of things, writing about a lot of, a lot of these topics and excited to have done this. I was, I was nervous about doing a solo podcast, how it'd be perceived, but I had a good time and the purpose of my podcast is for me to have interesting conversations and refine my topics. So I'm, I'm happy with how this went. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed. Later.