The Wolf of All Streets, Scott Melker | Where It Happens

0:00all right we just got done with a very interesting conversation with scott melker otherwise known as the wolf of all streets on twitter we went into a lot of stuff what'd you have greg the wolf is a busy it's a busy job to be a wolf the guy who works harder than anyone else and uh listen if you wanna if you wanna out perform you do have to put in the hours and and and he's got like a podcast he's got emails twit tweeting all the time takes a lot of work yeah we went into the creator economy in depth super interesting and just the trajectory of it and just the

0:35last few years for him and the dark times he went through to get to where he is today it was a really interesting conversation you guys are gonna love it let's dive right in 2022 is a great time to take control of your sleep i used to sleep like crap but not anymore ever since i found beam cbd's dream sleep product it's been a complete game changer for my sleep i fall asleep faster stay asleep longer and i wake up feeling refreshed not groggy it's a nano cbd product so it actually gets absorbed into your body more effectively it tastes great and you're gonna love it i

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1:41i need to i feel like kick this off by telling the story of why we are all sitting here because it is very uh i don't know i think it's very telling of like the era that we live in and also it's a really interesting story about you and about your personality the type of person you are um and it's really for me at least personally the reason why i'm sitting here in the first place and so scott and i met and i don't think you know this story either so it's a good one um back in like may of 2020 kovit had hit world was on fire there was like you

2:14know everything was [ __ ] disaster at the time like i think the markets the markets had probably recovered by then but like world was in chaos everyone was unemployed like [ __ ] was hitting the fan and i wrote this thread and i had like i had 500 followers on twitter at the time threads weren't really a thing yet and i like sat on my garage floor had this idea of like how to try to explain basically why the markets were soaring while the economy was in the [ __ ] and so i write this thing and i post it and like not much happens

2:43and then i dm'd it to scott and i just seen him on twitter he had big following i think you had like 100 thousand followers at the time maybe just under that yeah and um i dm'd it to him not expecting anything and then suddenly like my phone is [ __ ] blowing up and i look and scott has like quote retweeted this thing angel you're an angel and i'm like losing my mind texting all my friends like dude this is insane this guy just retweeted me this is nuts i'm you know i've like gained 250 followers in 10 minutes and um basically then so you know that tweet

3:14kind of blew up and then what happened over the next six months was like the remarkable part and it says a lot about scott but basically as i was like starting to kind of create more and write and share um for no reason other than just being a good guy scott was like my patron saint he would like share everything i was doing with his big and fast growing audience at the time um and basically took me along for the ride with him and so it was like this really cool thing where um you know i'd met someone through the internet like we had never met in person actually right now as

3:46we're sitting here oddly enough is the first time we've ever met in person but we would talk every single day um i was helping with some of the stuff scott was working on on the business side as he was growing his empire and here we are today and he's been like you know if i could point to one person that was most influential in getting me to where i am it's scott and so it's a very cool thing for me to be able to like sit here now i went on his podcast and it was like the first podcast i had been on and i remember being really nervous

4:14being like do you really want to have me on this i only have 10 000 followers can you remember me saying that i was like scott that this isn't good for you you've got a big following i've got like ten thousand dollars i'm some random guy and i went on it so now it's kind of a thrill for me to be able to sit here and turn the mic around a little bit and uh and talk to you that's amazing i wouldn't have even described it that way which is funny i would say that yeah how would you describe it chamath retweeted that that thread that's that's how i remember

4:44who was first i actually don't remember i thought you were i think i might have been first and then it kind of went a bit viral and then it got to him through no doing of my own and then he retweeted it but listen i think it's a testament to the fact that especially in this era like good content rules everything right and so it was not hard to identify the fact that you had written this incredible accessible thread on a very complicated topic which you made seem very easy it was the story of federico who yeah mr federica mr federico the fed of course i i i remember it almost word

5:21for word because it was so compelling and you focused in on that and continued to do that it was impossible not to share the content that you made because you know i think the ethos of a lot of what many of us do is we want to take complicated topics and make them more simple because they're important and people need to understand what's actually happening around them and you launched that sort of 101 thread series where it was like the fed put nobody knows what the fed put is options you know all these very uh complex target uh topics that don't really need to be that complex yeah it

5:54is like it's a story of web three too which is what i love about it in that um a lot of the things we talk about on this show is like the openness of it it's like borderless doesn't matter whether you're the country club kid from greenwich connecticut or if you're the kid growing up in india if you're creating great things if you're creating great artwork in the context of the things we're seeing this week if you're creating great content it can be shared and you can reach people and it was a cool case study of that but it's cool to see the people and it's inspiring when you're on the

6:24ground to see you know when you're like just getting started to see the people like where you were at the time who had already made it in my mind i know you probably didn't think that but like i felt that way i don't to yeah none of us do right like i'm sitting here i don't feel that way and other people probably do and so it was so cool to see like that positive sum ethos that i think characterizes a lot of crypto and web 3 that people haven't really appreciated yet like outside looking in people still look at crypto web 3 and they're like oh

6:50scam fraud whatever but there's so much positivity and willingness to kind of embrace share and grow the space that is happening within it 100 and i think that that's such an external perception and this couldn't be further off as you said from what's happening internally it's funny i just on my way here stopped at my friends they're music producers at their studio hadn't seen them since i lived in miami want to hang out and they were talking about man we're really starting to embrace this like nft and crypto producer thing people actually help each other it's not like the music industry where everybody's [ __ ] on

7:21each other all the time right and you know my background um like i went to an ivy league school and was going to go the finance route yeah you got to tell you know i went to the university of pennsylvania and i decided to be a dj basically the gist of it with a thousand twists and turns in between but i was a guy who like got an ivy league degree threw it away and decided to go dj clubs downtown in philadelphia you know i'm very very proud i'm sure my parents were at the time although they were always very supportive of it but you know the

7:48music industry is quite literally the opposite everybody is for themselves nobody wants to help each other anyone you do business with is gouging you at every possible turn and it really is not like that in the crypto industry it is the first time i've been a part of anything and that's web 3 in general not not not cryptos per se where it really feels like you're on a team and everybody's winning together right it's like being at the craps table and and you know everybody's cheering and of course you have that one guy who's on the don't pass line who you hate but you know and

8:18but but the other nine people at the table are cheering they're winning together and it's sort of how i feel being in this in this industry so i i think you're absolutely right and i think the team is worldwide right it's not even just 10 years ago it would have been like the people you could assemble around you in your town or in your like you know some sort of social media group or something now it's everyone everywhere yeah and uh and we're just scratching the very very basic surface so not to derail the conversation but i just realized we've met before we have we have met before yeah

8:54so you stole my girlfriend this is going to be awkward no you're married okay so i'm trying to remember the place where we met but we met in gainesville florida which is where that makes perfect sense that makes sense okay um sam tarantino okay do you know santa tarantino yes so okay so he started a company called group shark okay do you remember group shark i think he introduced us is that possible that distinctly possible if you were in gainesville florida and you met a guy that looks like who is a dj who threw away his ivy league degree and there's like they're like yeah yeah you have a group chat with the

9:41three of us there's right hey guys yeah it's like a group therapy session but yeah yeah i think you're doing all right i remember group shark well so that that makes perfect sense see a small world yeah yeah it's so cool too because it's like the the thing that i find so fascinating about this like we're here you know it's our puzzle week and there's a lot of cool stuff going on um but it's so it's such an eclectic group of people like in in tech i lived in san francisco in the bay area for a long time not anymore luckily but there it's like it's only really one

10:12type of person and it gets a bad rep for that but it's like a lot of the tech bro is like what it gets a rap for when you come to the web three world it really isn't eclectic you know there's musicians there's artists micah is a great example like a baseball player turned artist turned nft extraordinary turn ip you know like maven uh it's such an amazing diverse group of talents and people that are coming together in this like really awkward mishmash and it makes sense right if you're over like 35 years old you're not native right right you didn't grow up with it but i i still didn't get my first cell

10:48phone until my senior year of college and i was like the first guy and it was one of those big bricks and people thought i was scarface or from night at the roxbury yeah that's what i was going to say nut at the rocks but i think that that's the reason right all these other industries even tech to a degree because silicon valley is an 80s thing right as much as it evolved into what it was the silicon valley already had its core i think everybody's sort of figuring it out together and came to it through some other uh channel right so that's why you get you get the ex-athletes who are now

11:18painters like mike as we sort of mentioned below before that the ex-dj who turned traitor who became an enthusiast and you have people from every single walk of life who were sort of either successful but didn't find what they were looking for in whatever they were doing previously or aged out i would say you know you may have aged out of sports i age certainly aged out of djing looking for a second act and you know investing is a powerful second act for quite a few people and if you can do that in a market like this it's pretty compelling but i really think that's the reason is because

11:51nobody has that like i've been here for 40 years mentality yeah i failed out of sports for what it's worth i don't know i mean at some point i was just bad so sorry i'm just i'm remembering now so i'm still stuck okay so i like no because you're even in gainesville already yeah exactly right so when i met you it must have been 2017 or something i don't remember you saying crypto i don't remember you you might have been like doing it on the side but correct i don't remember you having a big twitter following is this something that's new-ish for you relatively new so i

12:32i mean i joined twitter before bitcoin was invented right i've been there since basically the video i think 2008 or 2009 i joined twitter whenever it started and it was because of music right i was a music account i got my blue check that everyone thinks is from crypto because of my djing and music production so uh i rode that maybe i had 40 000 followers come 2016 and 17 had a kid decided i didn't want to you know be on the road anymore didn't want to tour as i said i got older it's always the joke like matthew mcconaughey and dazed and confused you know i felt

13:06like uh i get older they stay the same age that's how i felt with djing like no matter how old i get everyone i'm djing force 21 and wants to party right it just didn't really work um and so you know i'd been trading already i loved trading i loved markets um and crypto was this sort of world of unicorn 100x pumps in late 2016 and early 2017 and i just timed it well right a huge part of i think anyone's story in this industry is certainly luck and timing right if i had this exact same story at the very beginning of 2018 it would be very different right um so i

13:39did well fast i became very passionate about it and i immediately alienated everyone who followed me on twitter like one day it was like i've got this show come to south by southwest whatever and the next day it was like check out this chart of bitcoin like right and people and back then my charts were hideous lines all over the place and uh and so i immediately like cut my followers in half right are you really lonely followers oh i lost like i became a completely and utterly different thing and if you were following me for like new music releases why would you follow me when i'm

14:11starting to talk about internet magic which is pretty courageous and there's not that many people honestly that do that i feel like jack butcher did that a little bit when he got into web 3 he was he was tweeting about like design exclusively and then all of a sudden he was just like hard pivot no i don't think it was intentional i think uh you know i'm like a vicious adhd case and when i get super like into something i know people say adhd gives you like makes you [ __ ] but for me it's a hyper focus thing almost like an obsession so i just talk

14:41about what i'm into and that was what i was into so my twitter account had gone through like probably weird twists and turns throughout but there was nothing intentional about it zero expectation that i would gain followers because of it right i was just talking about what i was into and what's social media for if not to share what you're passionate about at that very moment i view it as sort of like a timeline of my life right um and for whatever reason you know people started to engage with it and it built again from there and at a certain point i think it's just the snowball gets bigger

15:12and starts heading downhill and you you know it's a sort of a big fish small pond probably scenario to some degree and it just snowballed out of control but that's very likely that i was probably talking about it superficially on twitter but not actually in person and i was still like sort of on the downturn of djing taking the few good things here and there and figuring out what i wanted to do with my life that's what i remember i remember you coming back to gainesville and you were basically like yeah man like like that's why i think we connected because you we want you know you're kind of like yeah

15:42i'm i'm trying to figure out what i want to do with my life yeah and so now i look at it i'm like at four yeah but i remember i remember like before you you know that's the first time we're re-meeting yeah um but sahil was like this guy scott's coming he's like the man i checked your twitter account i was like whoa this is like amazing content and like it felt like you were the statue you know this sort of like you've been you know you're you've been doing this for 10 years right but nobody has well there's a few people who have but i think that uh that's what's funny

16:15about social media yeah right so i guess that's one of the lessons i'm kind of picking up which is like there's a few lessons actually one is um it's amazing how quick you can rise um yeah with consistent yeah daily i'm looking at both of you i'm like you know it you can't do it alone you can't do it alone and you had mentors people that yeah people that helped me and like i said this kind in this community and sort of this web 3 and tech community people get it and they share your content it can go viral very fast and it's funny i'd gone viral for all

16:52these random things before in my life massively viral like one of them was a inflatable tube man that looked like he was twerking and i put it to a migos song called hannah montana got like you know 40 or 50 million views didn't do anything for me right i had music projects that i had that went viral i went viral for writing a story on my facebook page about donald trump jr when we went to college together which was screenshot and became national news right still to this day if you search your name i think it's like the first thing that comes up on google miami dj says donald trump jr

17:30right yeah um and so but none of that ever stuck or was to any benefit to me in fact some of it was probably damaging right um but because there was no i think thought behind it and no meaning and it wasn't connected right and now when you sort of get this narrative like you have you defined yourself as this specific thing like i'm going to teach people complicated topics in a simple manner for me it was like i want everyone in the world to know about bitcoin right i want and and and that's how it started but whatever manifestation of that became web 3 nfts d5 play to earn

18:06gaming all the things that that's become but in 2016 it was like there's so much money to be made here you guys got to jump on this boat right and and that was a very simplistic and unfortunate view probably at that time uh and it took a bear market i think for a lot of us to become very passionate about it you know you have to justify the reason that you're still here um but i think you know when you sort of uh put that all together and you start to go viral for things it actually builds into something real that people could sort of engage with it's very easy to be a

18:35one-hit wonder i think yeah the consistency that was what i admired about what you were doing there were a couple things i mean number one i said it earlier like the positive sum mentality of it and being willing to help other people just as you got help along the way is like just amazing and it's something that i now try to embody when there are people that are contacting me or reaching out to me is like i want to help because i got a lot of help along the way and it's a good ethos on life the other one is the consistency of the efforts it's just

19:00like daily pounding your head into a wall and not everything goes viral not everything scales you the like 10 000 followers and you jump but it's that like consistency of effort day in and day out pounding your head into a wall that eventually you break through and you were a great example of that because you just i mean you've been relentless like as long as i've known you and you've had to deal with crypto twitter still has like a dark side and there's a lot of anonymous accounts and there's people that attack and like say negative things and you have your family on there it's a long and nonsensical story but if

19:32you ask certain people i'm the reason that i think the entire crypto market crashed may but uh obviously obviously not the case but you know that people it was a very uh interesting and uh surprising example of how fast fake news can go when people want to believe it you know and i think that there's obviously an element always of trying to tear people down uh who are successful and i'm one of the few people who's non-anonymous in the in the yeah you have your face very very and your wife very nice target you know yeah i i over share certainly for someone who's in crypto which uh

20:08is probably not the not the best thing you know you have to deal with the dark sides of it but yes for sure and so i you know like uh i've definitely dealt with uh some some crazy stuff you know it it turned into a lot of sim swapping and hacking uh people attempting to you know i mean i've been hacked so many times at this point it's hard to count but you know people threatening me and trying to you know extort money from me saying that they have information which they don't you know but it's like literally endless um it's calmed down a bit it goes with

20:41the market you know up and down but as you said it's it's the dark side but i choose not to focus on that as like painful and brutal as those experiences are they're temporary right and i think it's a very interesting sort of exploration of human nature how how much the negative stands out over the positive if you if you could redo it all it's 2017 when we met and start your twitter account fresh anonymous account i think on your twitter title it says like the wolf of all streets maybe you call it the wolf of all streets would you do would you start it anonymous or would you be scott again i

21:22would be myself and without without question although like i envy the guys who are anonymous to some degree because they're i think it's just an easier way to interact with this particular community i wouldn't change a thing because like i feel like everything i've done is uniquely me you know and i think that maybe that's why it's funny they say you know it takes 20 or 30 years to become an overnight success but for myself i think that that's the case that i just found enough people who like either enjoy my content or like my personality or just see something of myself and then whatever that is i found enough of those

21:59people that it created a community that allowed it to be what it is and i don't think that would be the case if i was hiding behind a cartoon and i don't blame anyone for doing that honestly i don't begrudge them that at all just i don't think it would have ever worked for me i'm just too much of an over sharer i've been that way since i was a little kid so i could just well you're also like i mean you're a dj you're an entertainer there was no like yeah and so what if i was gonna change the face of my twitter account and all of a sudden i'm not a dj

22:26i'm like a wolf avatar you know i just don't think uh well i mean it's in your nature right like your nature when you play a show i also have friends who are musicians and comics and stuff like that like they thrive on putting their face out there connecting with the audience and having that interaction you're the man in the arena the funniest thing though i think the first time that i had an attempted cancelling on twitter was because a huge name in the twitter industry in the crypto twitter space i should say said that i had bought my account from a dj like killed a dj in buzz again i had

23:03like bought my blue check i was not verified it went wildly viral and i was like it's literally like i share pictures of myself my wife my kids it's the same guy like this is the most easily vetted fake news story in history and went crazy viral and i hear about it every single day three years later that's actually amazing yeah yeah but i bought my twitter account that it's not real that that i'm buying my followers like people just for some reason nobody wants to believe people don't like people there's always going to be a subset that of people that hate success and they they would prefer to we talked

23:36about this we talked about this like right before so we we just um we just interviewed jiho from axi infinity and he shared a picture of us all of us because we you know we're on the pod and like 95 of it was super positive but five percent of it was like really negative but that's the part those are the comments you're gonna remember and that was the point i was making to go circle back to what we were saying for whatever reason in the human psyche the negative comments weigh 100 times heavier than the positive ones yeah always right i can remember what someone said about my kids my wife or my mom and

24:14can't remember the 900 people who said wow you really changed my life with this idea or whatever you know that that for some reason that starts to wash kind of wash out but the negative ones and the negative experiences listen that's something you can like rationally sort through but i think your knee-jerk reaction is always to have an emotional sort of response to that negativity totally that's why you probably don't remember me i was probably really nice yeah yeah you're way too nice too man you got to be more of a dude you were praising this you were crazy can we talk i mean one of the things

24:49that's really interesting here too is like the overlay of all of this um of creator economy and all of the different cool monetization opportunities that exist within this creator world and you in particular and i'm kind of experiencing this now and i learned a lot from watching you do this it was like you know you've kind of consistently grown your sphere of creator work while also being actually like skin in the game and man in the arena on the investing side which by the way is like no small thing because a huge knock for a long time on like creators or like inspirational speakers or whatever was

25:27oh they're making money off of selling courses to you not off of doing the thing that they're teaching you to do and so you have your money where your mouth is like you're showing trading charts in your newsletter but you're actually putting skin in the game and making money on these trades and so it's different in that in that case which i i really do respect but can you talk about like the different things you've gone into i know you have you know podcasting newsletter the different stuff and like how you've thought about monetizing those things over time and and how that's scaled it's interesting i

25:56would love to say that it was intentional and you'll remember when we met i do i came to you to help give me some advice on scaling it as a business because that was never my approach i need that same advice now by the way um you know because uh it started as a guy tweeting you know and as i said there was no intention of becoming i didn't even know you could be a personality in the crypto space right i was literally following all the guys in the crypto space like a fanboy you know all these people i looked to them for advice and and

26:26somehow transitioned into that but it started as a twitter account one day i was like listen i like my tweets are all over the place i need a forum where i can speak in long form right and so i started a newsletter and it was the intention of the newsletter was going to be twice a week right it was only twice a week and it was just going to be all the thoughts i had had on twitter basically hashed out into longer ideas you know did you do it with review when you started i started immediately with review and it was free twitter acquisition here's an og yeah yeah

26:56preview game yeah and i think i can't speak but i think at one point i'm one of their two or three probably largest newsletters just because i started really in their infancy um and man there was a lot of pressure to go sub stack i'm not gonna lie yeah um but so i yeah i went with review i just i like the way they displayed my charts better and it just seemed like an easier interface i was really more of it than the business and so that started to sort of catch fire as a free newsletter and then became a job right my intention was just to put out

27:24more comment content and then one day i was like man i'm spending like 30 hours a week writing a newsletter at that time wow yeah and i was like i need to you know so i started charging 15 a month but kept the free issue so okay stop there just i'm fascinated about this so while you're doing this like did you have another job was this your full time you know you're like i mean i made the money trading and investing so you're like your full-time job is essentially trading investing your passion is putting your thoughts out there in the world is that correct correct when i started the newsletter

28:05i thought maybe maybe one day there'll be enough people who want to read this that i could somehow monetize it but i've never felt overly comfortable with monetizing my audience i have no problem monetizing a sponsor or a company that wants to support what i'm doing but i never wanted the money necessarily from the people but it became this challenge i was like i want to do this more i want to do this five days a week which was something that you know you were part of uh transition saying this it should you know say maybe we should be doing more content and so i started to charge the 15 but

28:36still kept the free issue just less frequently and that was a that was basically a decision you made saying i need to have the value for my time because i'm spending so much time on this it i need to feel like i kind of expect you to be a charitable giver when you have an audience but there's a certain point where you know time is money of course so i felt like fifteen dollars you know for five day at the time two days a week but transitioning to five was about as like fair as i could possibly offer and then i met the guys at block works jason janowitz

29:10randomly dm'd me on twitter so when i tell you there was no intention i mean there was no intention he said you should think about doing a podcast my response was what's a podcast they didn't know was that a thing where like you're not on tv but you're talking right i've never listened to a podcast literally in my life they didn't know what a podcast was either by the way i just had dinner with them and it was hilarious they just got 30 under 30 for black works it's cool very cool business they're awesome guys and he was telling me the story of blackworks and he was

29:37like we started these podcasts and we literally like pomp asked them like hey can you guys do podcasting and they were just like [ __ ] yeah sure we can do podcasting and then they were like googling what what is a podcast like how do you produce a podcast and now it's a 20 million plus business yeah and so i never you know really and so i it's amazing brutally horrifying to listen back to my first attempts at podcasting because you'd think i would have gone and listened to a few before i started as well but now in my normal manner i was just like it'll be fine

30:11go on with it my first one was catherine coley who at the time was the uh ceo of binance us and i like did all this prep you know and and all the questions and now i do my podcasts like this right i have my my assistant does prep they're guests that i generally know and i feel like i know this person by the time i start let's just have a conversation and see where it goes but so the podcast was sort of the next iteration i guess and then i was like wow podcasts don't come out that often i need to like engage with my audience more directly

30:40and i started a youtube channel where i could start live streaming and obviously the podcast go up there and that has just sort of become its own its own beast and i don't know how like the guys who like youtube hardcore it's it's it's it's a serious thing do those get monetized separately like so the largest sponsor they're not monetized every once in a while a company will come and say listen we want to like sponsor you know three months of a stream you're doing or something but like i said i did not start youtube with the intention of making more money i figure that will come

31:09um so the newsletter you know at its core has one sponsor that's been there from the very beginning in an exchange called femex and the the paid subscribers and then you know the podcast up to six uh sponsors at any given time two days a week but i that it was the same feeling i had with the newsletter i was like this podcast comes out two times a week sometimes the conversations i've had i feel like are already outdated crypto moves so fast so fast you know and if i make the mistake of actually talking markets with someone like we could be in a bear market or a

31:41bull market a week later and what we've talked about is already irrelevant so i wanted something that was sort of not just written and more accessible where i could engage with people and that's how i moved to youtube so it was sort of just just natural i think evolution and then then i realized i was like working yeah i mean you double shipped full-time job right at that time you had yeah you had fought like i mean it's insane if you follow him and you're on his newsletter which i am like i get a newsletter every single [ __ ] day by the way with like by seven days long by

32:12seven a yeah by seven amusement by the way like when i was on when i was on the west coast it was hilarious because i would get it at four like i'd wake up and i would get it at 4am and he was like the only person that somehow got me an email before i got up because i'm an early riser but literally like a newsletter super long with detailed charts and analysis every single day you get like two podcasts a week yeah two podcasts a week youtube lives like almost every day he was like the hardest working guy in crypto and no one was really talking about just like the

32:39amount of output that was coming out of this engine especially for the fact that it was quite literally just you i mean i have a team but like as far as like being the the face of it it's definitely just me i mean i get up at 4 30 every single morning five days a week monday through friday so that i can get the newsletter out ahead of my kids right because i then i missed her mom uh and i get them up breakfast get them to school come back do a live stream every single day wow uh at 9 30 or 10 o'clock in the

33:06morning now wait sorry i'm stopping right there so by 9am by lunch i've worked if you count kids as work and i think that's yeah put this way the weekends are a lot harder than the week right i've got my first kid on the way so this is what i'm looking forward to no it's great um it's terrific everybody have kids and uh lots of them uh but yeah i mean by by 10 30 in the morning when i finish my first live stream i've been full bore for six hours like relentless unstopping because i you know i write the newsletter in the morning uh which is long i have help from my

33:49assistant who like will prep some of the news and things like that and then the minute i'm back from dropping my kids off i get with my youtube producer who sends me like all the content we're gonna do for that show and then i have to do all the diligence obviously and read everything and know what the hell i'm gonna talk about it's usually like 10 stories i do the morning stream then usually i record a podcast within the next two hours and then usually i go live again at 1 30 um with another hour-long ish live stream that's like three days a week um and

34:19none of that even includes any of my market work uh investments trading any of it and honestly like most of it's unpaid youtube crazy like it's not like ever i've never had a sponsor on my everyday morning live streams i just do it because it's it's fun you're like a one-man crypto cnbc man you're like it's like non-stop he's got squawk box and then he's got like the next thing in the day fast money and i love it i love it i listen when i when i get sick of it i slow down yeah like well you've always been good about that which it's a i feel like it's

34:55a common theme that comes up with people we've talked to which is super high achievers people that have achieved incredible success but that have all a common thread i've found at least you should tell me if you disagree have found some way to be able to like pull back and when they need to they're able to like kind of withdraw and recharge and i do feel like you've been able to do that like you've been posting more about like playing golf every now and then which just made me happy because i always knew like when you were getting burned out just as a friend yeah um when you just felt like

35:24oh man you're gonna try it now i'm like yeah is that why you took up golf like is so i played golf in high school um that i quit for 25 years and took it up again six weeks ago and it was yeah it was intentional my wife also works exceptionally hard we live in gainesville florida there's not much to do let's go play golf um of course i played golf too much and now i'm injured in every single part of my 45 year old age aged body um but yeah it was it was to force me out of the house so like even if it was just

35:56go you know hit balls for 45 minutes after that morning live stream to kind of reset for the afternoon it was great activity but i'll tell you like having children naturally slows you down to some degree i'm not saying it's not very fast pace but like if you put your phone down and spend the evening or the morning with your kids or an hour in the afternoon you you it's pretty easy to detach and to focus on whatever insanity is going on through their little brains at that moment uh and so i think uh that becomes naturally easier as you get older because it's almost forced like

36:31you don't have a choice your kids need to eat you know yeah you gotta take care of that can we can we talk about um talk about trading like it's one it's it's an underlying thing in everything you're doing is um trading technical analysis charts uh analyzing all of these you know stocks current events crypto markets all of these things that are happening um how did you get into that like what what are things that a normal person should be thinking about or looking at should they not be trading if you don't you know if you're not really going to spend time around it should you

37:07just invest for the long run like what what what are some of your thoughts around trading the latter so listen trading's fun but the first thing everyone should know is you're going to lose and it should be your play money that that the the bottom of every bank email that says you know uh pass results not indicative of future uh gains and and be careful and only invest money you can invest in boys 100 true right so i i naturally got into it when i was at penn in the late 90s at penn like wall street finance jobs was like gathering halloween camp right i mean literally

37:43no no joke my big big brother and my fraternity went to work for solomon smith barney became the pen recruiter recruited my big brother in my fraternity who then said do you want a job at solomon smith barney to me and i said i don't know what that is and i also don't have a resume is that problematic i'm dj and he's like no you're hired if you want the job i didn't take it but it was that easy right so to go the old boy's closetman banking job uh and so obviously i had a superficial knowledge of markets and sort of a basic understanding at that point um

38:13but i learned by the school of hard knocks which i don't think most people generally survive i was just kind of there long enough to succeed i mean the first time i really got any money in my life and i'm not talking about a lot of money i'm talking about like paying off my debt so i actually have some money i started investing was like 2006 and 2007 so you can imagine how well that went uh considering the timing right so i lost all of that uh in 2012 i went all in on a stock called eric's it was a pharmaceutical company i you know i had

38:45heard from friends who were consulting there that they had this groundbreaking drug that was going to be released i'm not kidding like i put basically everything i had into it was trading at six dollars um a month later on the earnings quarterly earnings call the ceo showed up like i don't know on mushrooms or something it was like yeah guys we were like money is going to be a problem man it was really i think it was high and the stock went to zero full dose i literally rode a actual company that was listed on the stock market zero and a d listing i saw a hilarious thing by the way on riding

39:18to xero the other day which you might have seen of um all of these people that have shorted a stock and if it's short of stock you're like borrowing shares to sell and you actually need to be able to close that short out and if it goes to zero and is de-listed you cannot yeah you're getting it out of yourself and so you're paying the carrying load of interest on something that like you could not have been more right about but it literally you can't get out of it so there are these hedge funds there's like perfect trade there's like there's a list of of hedge funds

39:45that are like completely [ __ ] because they're sitting in a short that was perfect you wanted to go to like a dollar liquidity in liquidity yeah so i quit for a very long time and then i sort of got back into trading uh you know a little bit of options forex and stuff and learned technical analysis sort of on my own i had a mentor this guy christopher inks who uh texas west capital who i met on twitter uh years ago and uh sort of developed it from there and uh but to your point the most important thing everyone can know is just don't trade

40:18just don't trade it's so easy to make money in crypto by simply investing and waiting that's not even just true in crypto i always like to tell people all of these people who've made generational wealth in the stock market the baby boomers that have millions of millions of dollars have never even heard of technical analysis not only have they never thought about trading or looked at a chart they don't even know that they exist right all they've literally ever done is taken money that they don't need and put it into something and let inflation do the rest of the job funny personal story on this exact thing so earlier this year

40:54when i was leaving my job and i was going to go start this new thing um i thought i was going to go join like another fund and i was interviewing at this i won't name i won't name it but there's a large crossover investment funds they do venture and they do hedge fund stuff and i had to do a case study and i had to talk them through why i thought this stock was a buy or a short and i pitched it as a buy and then they asked me at what price and i said and they were like why not right here because i said slightly under it and i

41:21had like seen i didn't know [ __ ] about trading stocks like i knew nothing because i just bought and held stuff and i had seen some of scott's stuff on like oh moving averages and this and that and so i said like wow the 50 to you know just dropped below the 50-day moving average so it looks like it's got some downside and the like founding partner of this firm on this thing looks at me and he's like what like i've literally in my entire career i'm like i've made a billion dollars and i've never thought about a 50-day moving average and i wanted to

41:51like unzip my body and just like run away needless to say did not get the job by the way i got rejected right but it was unbelievable and that illustrates my point perfectly right so even at the like peak degeneracy of my hardcore trading which i'm decent at i would never trade with more than 20 of my portfolio 15 i learned very early that you're probably not going to beat the market and the core of your portfolio should be invested right so where is the curious like where you're 75 you're you know where is that money so listen and the funny thing is before covid i was one of the hardcore crypto guys

42:33who was saying yeah but still don't have more than like 15 of your money in crypto it's still a risky investment but then i stopped rebalancing you know i saw the nonsense that was happening with money printing obviously and stocks only going up while people on mainstream were suffering all the memes that are very real and very true and it just became readily apparent that i didn't really want that much to do with that system anymore that doesn't mean i sold all my stocks i still invest in my retirement accounts i still passively buy all the things that i've always passively bought but for me now crypto is

43:07you know 70 80 of my portfolio and then breaking that down 70 percent of that i've always believed 70 investments 15 cash 15 for trading and investing in your best friend's company that is going to lose your money right um that's that's been there the 15 yeah i guess uh fund um and that's basically bitcoin was the core of it always ethereum caught up so it's a 60 40 bitcoin ethereum split now for me and then the rest okay we'll call that uh you know 58 38 and the rest is the dust from the best trades of my life do a trade goes up 100 x something like

43:50that which happens in crypto i never sold the last five or ten percent of that position and moved it into the long term in case that is the amazon of the future in 20 years and i don't feel like i missed the boat i'm a huge fan of scaling in and scaling out of positions and always keeping a little something just in case so there's you know this sort of dust of all these other things but still as deep down this rabbit hole as i am i still believe that bitcoin is the most important asset and that it's a slow sort of drip from there obviously

44:18to ethereum and then way down the risk curve to where some of them start to just naturally look like trades and not necessarily like like investments but i still think your average person should have a stock portfolio right like listen we can rail against the problems with inflation and the problems with fed policy but that benefits people who take advantage of that inflation by buying assets and buying hard assets and that should be you on if you can you know but uh it's a it's a bit of a hard pill to stomach the further you go down sort of this rabbit hole and the more orange

44:52peeled or red pilled whichever one you want to say and you really watch it i mean it's like watching it's like watching a horrible comedy you know like one of those comedies that's also gut-wrenching kind of like cable guy you know that movie cable guy with j you're like he's so funny but it's like it hurts you know yeah um like the scene in swingers where he calls the girl like 12 times in a row like that you know like i look back i'm like that's hilarious but also stop calling you know um and so it's just really hard to like i don't actively want to go out and invest

45:26and buy stock right now i just don't have you done um anything new like i'm thinking about like new markets so you were clearly you know you went heavy into crypto like you embraced this new market new asset class one of the new asset classes i've been starting to get excited about which greg i like i keep talking azir off about is um event contracts and like uh prediction markets and so predict it was sort of the like first player that was in this space the challenge with them was it wasn't regulated until the limits were like 500 or something like that so it was fun

45:59like you could bet on donald trump or uh buy it or whoever yeah yeah and you could do those things but like yeah yeah exactly and it wasn't but it was small and then recently i came across this platform which uh it called calci that i um had a lot of fun with was like it was the first um cftc regulated they like spent two years getting cftc regulated so there's no limits and there's market makers there's liquidity there's these huge markets and i had so much fun with it that i like pounded on their door until they let me invest in the platform which i'm super psyched about and it's

46:32awesome but the thing that has struck me about that is like it's a new market and there's still so much pricing and efficiency in it because it's so new that it's like it's almost a feature of the market because i get in there and i look at it and there's things happening like you know they're yes no contracts and so there was one like the whole stupid janet yell in the unrealized capital gains tax and there was a market that was like will that get passed by december 31st 2021 it had to be that was like one to a hundred yeah no but he was trading at 87 cents on the no and i was

47:05like okay so in a month i'm gonna make 13 like that's the easiest i will pour any amount of money into that because the government can't get [ __ ] done first off on that time on anything let alone that maybe take and but it was like i mean it was it was those kind of things when you see a new market it's kind of a cool opportunity so like are you do you experiment with any new markets have you looked at prediction markets like are there any things that you're seeing out there that are interesting to you i i haven't really looked at prediction markets uh i want to intro

47:34you to these guys but i would i would absolutely love that but i have in the last uh year really started doing a lot of like smaller angel stuff it's always my belief though i think you're much more in the weeds like i i know what i know and i will invest in anything where i trust the person knows what they know right and that's always been my path so you know from going to school where i did i have a lot of very successful friends they have different hedge funds funds so like a friend of mine runs a fund called merida capital and it's marijuana investments i know

48:05nothing about marijuana investments but i know that i want to invest in it so i invest in his fund and call it a day yeah right rather than trying to figure it out myself i'd rather go to the guy who knows exactly what he's doing that's a great mental model by the way just to pause on that like just it do what you're great at and be exceptional at the thing you're great at and outsource everything [ __ ] else even within crypto now two other people that are great at those things right even within crypto now i'm taking a very similar approach but when i came into

48:34crypto it was like bitcoin ethereum and a basket of all coins right now it's the metaverse and d5 and nfts and right so like i i'm not i don't have enough time or under even comprehension to get into punks and apes and other jpegs in cartoons i'm not saying they don't have value i'm saying i don't understand it and i'm not going to throw my money at something i don't understand but i'll invest in someone's nft fund right like uh there's arca who's a big hedge fund in the space i just invested in their d5 fund but i'm looking at their nft fund now because i don't know enough about it i know

49:11about the platforms that are building it i have a superficial understanding of the market but now crypto is so exciting and there's so much happening i don't feel like i can even keep up with that right so i need people to to fi to guide me in the directions even within crypto like play to earn and i mean metaverse yeah the metaverse is going to be economies of scale beyond anything we've even seen in the real world for the investment opportunities one day you can't tell me you're going to be able to figure out what the best investments are in that space it's a powerful i mean

49:43this is a really really powerful thing for people to understand and like everyone that's listening to this is you don't need to be a genius at everything you're not going to be and so focus on playing the games that you are uniquely well suited to win the things that you can really double down on and become an expert in really focus on those go deep become that expert and double down and the things you're not embrace the fact that you don't know that outsource it to people who are to your point like invest in the fund where that person is spending all of their time on nfts or defy whatever it is but

50:17don't feel like you need to go be an expert in everything we've talked about it with solana i'm like the idiot that somehow has completely missed solana but my whole thing greg has keep he keeps giving me [ __ ] about it like oh you haven't invested in it and my my whole thing with it is and i'm probably an idiot uh i'm sure it's gonna be amazing but i have not spent the time nor do i have the time to go do my research and diligence to understand it and so will i go and invest in a friend who really has done and and i have done that i'm an lp in

50:48funds that are doing that and so i probably have some derivative bets on it but i don't have the bandwidth or the time to understand it so i want to play games where it's my playing field and the table is set how i like it like if you're a tennis player if you're serena williams you don't want to go and play the match that maria sharapova wants to play you want to play your match so so what's the advice you know not everyone went to an ivy league school and has friends who right or is accredited or exactly access which is a whole other conversation unfortunately yeah

51:19unfortunately so what's the advice for people who want to do basically employ the strategy of find the smartest person you know and give them and place a bet you know how do people think about that that only comes with access and that's the reason it's only something i've been able to do in the last few years unfortunately the fact is the united states law that is supposed to protect consumers actually prohibits consumers or prohibits your average citizen who does not have enough money from the same opportunities that wealthy people have it's a sad but real truth and that's why i love d5 and i love crypto because

51:56everybody has a level playing field in that space as long as i don't regulate it away and do the same thing to it which is another conversation and another possibility but what i would say in a lesson that i learned listen there's famous quotes about it right don't put all your eggs in one basket but then there's a flip side of that uh buff it someone you know put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket right and so i i've had mark yusuko from morgan creek on my i was one of the favorite people in the world this guy's more like sound bites than any human

52:23being you could make one of those like little sound boards on the internet i don't know you're coming you're a close second yeah yeah well that's mario man from all my podcast guests um but mark said to me he's like you know that's a total misnomer to say to diversify diversification is what you do when you're already rich you don't get rich through diversification you get rich through concentration with the caveat being that you choose right right so i would say if you're young and you can afford to lose because when you're you don't feel like when you're 25 that you can afford to go broke but

52:56you can completely afford to go broke you can reinvent yourself find something else especially in this world with the gig economy and you know find something that you're very passionate about or very good at and concentrate all of your energy on that and once that succeeds then you can start placing those bets in those other arenas the fact is if you're a 25 year old with a 50 000 a year job who's just getting by and paying rent you can't have investments in six different arenas and spaces you just can't uh so your butt you can buy an index fund and protect the stock market which is what i

53:28did you know just buy spy man just buy sby call it a day number go up correct correct me if i'm wrong it feels feels like you've had high conviction throughout your life really like you've placed like you haven't placed all your eggs in one basket you've kind of you talked about it right you talked about how this you know there was that pharmaceutical stock and you kind of like went all in or you know you got excited about kryptos you went all in is it safe to say that like you've had you've had this strategy for 20 years i would say i've had this strategy for 20 years and it failed for

54:0418. exactly 27 years probably i started i was starting you know i tell the story as i left penn and i became a dj and that erases 20 years of utter and epic entrepreneurial failures that i tried in between on the side of dj i actually started a company with four friends from college called phillytonite.com which is in 1998 1999 that was a nightlife website for philadelphia restaurants if you remember city search which yeah i remember it was basically a localized city search in philadelphia and then we ended up not getting along and i quit the year after college was djing on the side i have 10 examples

54:44like that i actually was the editor-in-chief of a magazine that i started in philadelphia which then got consumed by another publication in new york which is why i eventually moved to new york i became their editor-in-chief lasted one year because probably not the easiest person to work with and i'm not very good at the whole having a boss thing but uh yeah i mean i've you know i sort of like advanced the ball very slowly but by like falling down and hitting it with my face as opposed to some dramatic beautiful uh move you know um and luckily i think that i just always had at least a small

55:19safety net or something i was doing that could sustain it and keep me afloat as i sort of uh found what i was good at i had a great dj career but i was never the big name on the top of the flyer right i was always the guy behind the guy or the smaller name on the flyer or the opening act for this guy or the dj in this guy's band and it was amazing and i made money and i and it was super fun and i played in stadiums you know but rarely was that specifically about me right so i would say i was like i made it to like level d

55:49you know of the of the a-list um and this is the first thing that i found where i sort of with that same mentality have found this level of success but it is definitely fair to say i mean i've never been deterred by anyone else's opinion of what i should be doing certainly or uh really have ever wasted my time on something i didn't find interesting i i you know like i said i don't pay attention to i don't have hyper focus unless i'm super passionate about it i will just i'll wash out i could never have one of i could never just have a basic desk job where i do a

56:24menial task and i i actually think it's amazing that people can do that i would just get fired like they would walk in and i'd be playing a video game you know i just wouldn't and i would have gotten my work done in 20 minutes and be bored for seven and a half hours trying to pretend that i was doing work you know it's just sort of the nature that's how i got through school as well um you know so yes i think that uh i've always been hyper focused i just got lucky enough that i finally found something where that worked and you you continued

56:51like you didn't give up right imagine being married to me though or being my parents who sent me to that ivy league school right it's it's probably a struggle but uh it's good to win in the end i guess to some degree but it was not always easy yeah i mean the whole thing that i'm coming away with is like just this idea of like just stop playing other people's games and play yours i've written about this before and i think about it so much because it's i mean it tracks my own personal stories like i for a long time felt like i was playing someone else's game and i went down the

57:27career path that like i thought i was supposed to or that people were excited about for me and i felt like it was prestigious and people thought highly of me because of it but it wasn't my game it wasn't my zone of genius and we all i think we all need to find ours and it's a process like it took you 27 years it took me at least seven um probably longer and i just think for everybody listening one of the things like i'm really learning from you is like through this story and your whole trajectory it's just find the things that you are great at

58:00find the things that you're passionate about and just go all in on those and stop worrying about the [ __ ] you're bad at honestly like people focus so much on like my weaknesses i'm gonna try to work at my weaknesses you're much better off and it's like maybe it's contrarian advice and it's a hot take but like you're much better off just saying [ __ ] it to the stuff you're bad at and like i'm probably not gonna ever be amazing at those things i'm bad at let me just like not focus on it and i'm gonna double down and go all in on the [ __ ] i'm great at yeah and

58:29go contribute and like get in the discord the community aspect of this if you wanna go participate in things go join a community be a part of it go create jiho is an amazing example of that like he was just a he was like mopping the floors in the community uh in the early action days and now he's a co-founder of it he's the head of the girl the ceo of twitter was just a lowly engineer crazy i mean the ceo of walmart is like a perfect example in a blue collar way of like he as a stocking manager in a walmart store and now he's

58:57the ceo of one of the biggest companies in the world biggest retailer in the world it's amazing and i think all of that comes from just being willing to double down on the things you're great at and just saying screw it to the stuff you're not as good at and yell yell like you create content right like do it just like just put it out there if your content's good enough eventually and like i said initially it's going to be bad but eventually it'll evolve into something that people engage with and listen if you're bad at it no one engages with it you'll move on with your

59:25life but at least you got to try and i think a huge part of what you're saying which i agree 100 with is another thing you always say would you shoot your shot right it's it's also letting go of the fear of judgment or rejection that comes along with it because i feel like that's what holds a lot of people back from really fully pursuing that dream i mean you always tell me the story or we joke about how you just cold called basically mark cuban by typing in a bunch of email addresses and hoping that one of them was going to match you know and that

59:54worked the guy started retweeting your content and engaging with you and you know most people are not willing to do that most people are not willing to suffer the judgment of their family and friends when they say i'm going to quit my job and become a twitter you know influencer not what i said but there are people obviously i'm going to become an instagram influencer right that's what i want to do or i'm going to become a trader i'm going to go all in on trading and take all the money that i have and i'm going to make money doing this an artist micah johnson we keep talking about i'm

1:00:23going to quit baseball and become a painter i've never painted i've only painted for two years but i'm going to become a painter now is one of the most prolific nft artists in the world because he has the talent to support it but i think there's so much fear of judgment and failure and just being shot down that people never quite fully pursue it so not only do you got to go all in you got to then also disregard all the external factors and find a community that embraces you for doing that because like i i had you and it's a good example of it like you were

1:00:56so supportive of the things i was doing and saying like this is [ __ ] awesome you should be doing this full time like why and you were saying that to me and then i met greg through a group chat that we were in and like all of these people when i was going i was about to go take another you know job in the finance world and they were all like why are you doing that like that doesn't make any sense yeah and that was what i thought i was supposed to do because of what everything i'd done before but i had people and i had a community that

1:01:20actually believed in me before i believed in myself on these things and gave me the like permission almost that i felt like i needed to do that and so you need to and they're out there and now with the internet you can find those people but it's it's incredible it's amazing and so it's it's like give yourself give yourself the permission to go put your neck out on the line shoot your shot every amazing thing that's happened in my life has like somehow came from being shameless in some sense of like just going and putting myself out on the line and then find the community of people that will just

1:01:52embrace you for who you are and be genuine about it um and so many good things can happen if you do that i just like it because you asked about trading you know you guys asked about trading before that's what separates someone who succeeds in trading and someone who fails is being able to accept a loss not having fear of losing it's the only reason i was even decent at trading and i used to be terrible at terrible at it because i was so emotional about losing right it's the same thing that makes a good poker player makes a good athlete makes a good trader you have to just

1:02:22eliminate that fear and be able to accept a loss and move on with your life right you can't dwell on it forever if you're a traitor and you dwell on every single loss you take or you say um you know my plan was to only lose a thousand bucks but i think it's going to go right back up so i'm going to move my stop loss down zero right you lose in there been there right we've all been there and that and that's what and that's what separates is that ability to sort of have a confidence in your plan and to let that plan play out without

1:02:52fear and that at the end of the day being able to separate your emotions and act that out like a robot is what will make you good at trading which is but also will make you good at any of these things that you try to attack and tackle in life i mean if that's not a good place to end i don't really know this was like i honestly it's so funny because i didn't know where this conversation would necessarily go but it was for me at least personally it was like one of the more formative conversations i've had so that's a formative guide to him and

1:03:24formative conversation wow you're very cool for me this is this is awesome and thank you so much thank you guys we're we're we're going to reconnect we got to really reconnect we're already best friends i know exactly too positive now he's going to be a dick to you so that you remember him come on man i don't remember that i can't that's true he is too nice um where can people follow you everything is linked to my twitter okay go to his twitter s-o-t-t-a-l-k yeah and seriously like the most prolific content creator out there within the crypto world insane i've learned personally so much from you

1:03:58so and even if you're not interested in trading and you want to understand i don't want people to trade exactly and tune into a live stream or if you're not interested in crypto if you're not interested in making money just the fact that like you have a model for creating content i'm sure a lot of people listening want to understand how that happens it's a great way to get started and just follow you you're also just a fun guy man you post funny [ __ ] i try i appreciate it i mean we're all having fun at the end of the day we're all here for the memes

1:04:25yeah it's true life isn't mean i'm just trying to like do enough serious content that i can slide into exactly you've got 11 every time you've got a limit awesome thank you so much thank you guys appreciate it thank you pretty wide wide-ranging conversation there um i had a few but what was your one big takeaway scott is not afraid to put in the work and share his curiosities that's for sure yeah he's i mean he's had like a pretty wide-ranging career man i mean he clearly had some like challenging times with some of the failures he talked about and what i took away was just this idea and

1:05:09this framework of just focusing on the things you're good at like finding your zone of genius and outsourcing the rest just being willing to go find the people that are great at the things you're not good at and just outsource to them and just double down on those things that you love that you're passionate about that you can get up every morning and do and go all in on those things and the outcomes let them be as they may and find your find your niche right like he he found like a subset of crypto twitter and became an influencer in like a niche that didn't really exist at the time

1:05:46and and [Music] you know built relationships and and and built something that people love so good on him for that yeah super interesting hope you guys enjoy it we're going to jump into the community with him and go deeper on it uh thank you all for tuning in 2022 is a great time to take control of your sleep i used to sleep like crap but not anymore ever since i found beam cbd's dream sleep product it's been a complete game changer for my sleep i fall asleep faster stay asleep longer and i wake up feeling refreshed not groggy it's a nano cbd product so it actually gets absorbed into your body

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