From Deep Blue to Bittensor — Why Subnets Are the Next Internet Boom

28:07Every Thursday, I would do a one-hour Q &A on Twitter about whatever topics. And somebody in March of 2013, someone asked me, what do you think of Bitcoin? And I said, you know, it's probably a scam. Seems like a Ponzi scheme. and Naval Ravikant called me up and he's a big Bitcoin guy. Naval Ravikant calls me up and he says, look, James, I'm going to be in New York. We need to sit down and I'm going to explain to you from beginning to end what Bitcoin is. And we got together. We had like a whiteboard. He's drawn all over it. We spent the day together. And by the end, I was so blown away by Bitcoin.

28:42And I was writing a book at a time called Choose Yourself. and Bitcoin felt to me like a choose yourself currency. Like I didn't need some bank to accept me as a client. I didn't need to use intermediaries to make payments I wanted to make. Like Bitcoin, there's so many things that it's like you're your own bank. I mean, I'm oversimplifying Bitcoin, but this was my feeling then. And so I created, I was releasing this book called Choose Yourself. And a month before I was releasing it, I created a Bitcoin only store and there was only one product in it, which was my book. I was selling my book for one 10th of a Bitcoin.

29:26Bitcoin was$61 at the time. I was selling my book, Choose Yourself, a PDF of it for one 10th of a Bitcoin. I think we had about 70 customers spend one 10th of a Bitcoin to get a PDF of my book. And it was a kind of a marketing gimmick a little bit to market my book, but it was also for me to explore Bitcoin. It was an experiment for me. And then I even went on CNBC and the anchor said, did you just do this as a marketing trick? And I said, well, I'm on national TV, so it worked. And I feel bad for those people who spent$12 ,000 now for a PDF of my book, but But yeah, I've been doing Bitcoin since 2013.

30:11And yeah, I think Tau is very much like Bitcoin and we could get into that. But just from a marketing perspective and also from what I was saying before about differentiating Tau synergies is that as an evangelist for Tau and as someone who's really maybe more expert in media than others, like I've had a lot of media outlets and I've written quite a bit and I've been on TV quite a bit. I understand how to spread the word about something. And that's why I built this Tau Daily. That's why I'm involving the community. That's why I'm, from an editorial perspective, I'm making sure the articles are very easy to understand and not very kind of, oh, you have to be one of the cool Tau kids to understand.

30:55And we'll see how it works. Again, I haven't launched it officially yet, but within the next day or so, I will. And it's a fun say. And that differentiates Tau Synergies. and look, it potentially gets me opportunities. You know, I'll learn the subnets better. I'll be able to invest in the subnets better. So it'll get me opportunities to make a lot more tokens per share maybe than anybody else.

31:19Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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34:20And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Do you think Tau Synergies will ever actively invest in subnets? I mean, I can't say for sure because it's a public company and that would be signaling, but I myself am interested in going in that direction.

35:05I mean, I think that's where, obviously, if the subnets do well, Tau does well. And obviously, it's also, like anything, there's an 80-20 rule with the subnets. 20 % of the subnets will provide 80 % of the value. So if people are looking to invest in all the subnets and make a lot of money, that's a mistake. You got to use a VC style analysis to figure out what the good subnets are. And that's a challenge, which is another reason why being involved in the media side, I'm able to just call up subnets and talk to them and also being on the investment side as well. So I do see that as very viable, as a potentially very strong strategy for any public treasury company.

35:44And I think also the yield, just getting more technical here, the yield right now on Tau, two months ago, it was 20 % if you staked in Root. Now it's 8%, and it's going down to 3 % because a lot of the staking is happening more and more in the subnets. So you have to get familiar with the subnets to really maximize your benefit from Tau. Do you think the APY of these subnets is reminiscent of some of those crazy APYs we've seen with Ethereum in the past? Yeah, I mean, and that will calm down. That's why you're going to have to do real thorough venture capital. I see people arguing in the discords and they're using candlesticks and charts to say which subnet's going up.

36:30that will never, by the way, that doesn't even work for stocks, but people think it does, but it will definitely never work on these subnets. That's like using charts to analyze a venture capital startup. It's not going to work. So you have to really, to understand which subnets and which alpha tokens are going to go up, you have to really do a deep dive on the subnet. Is the subnet have a big market? Are they executing properly? Is it a good product? Is the management team great? But then it's even harder than VC style analysis because you have to understand, are the alpha tokens going to do well if this subnet succeeds?

37:10That's not always the case. That's not even the case in the crypto world often. Like you're familiar with Uniswap, the exchange. So it's an exchange built on top of Ethereum. the Uniswap exchange is doing very well. But the Uni token, people don't realize it. The Uni token does not benefit from the success of the Uniswap exchange. The Uni token is, you buy the Uni token, you and I, you buy the Uni token if you want to vote on protocol changes on the Uniswap exchange. Who cares about that? Like, no, I don't want to vote. Nobody wants to vote on the Uniswap exchange. But there's no other benefit to owning the Uni token.

37:50So there's no reason. I think that's like a scam. People are buying the UniToken because they think it's correlated to the growth in the Uniswap exchange. The same way a share of McDonald's is correlated to the growth of the McDonald's company, but it's not. And that's what you have to be careful of in crypto is that the tokens, I remember this with Zcash back in 2018. I love Zcash. I love the technology, it's privacy coin, but the Zcash token, people were using the Zcash technology without it benefiting the Zcash token. And that's why the Zcash token never went anywhere. You got to be careful with that in crypto in general.

38:29And in these subnets also, make sure you really understand how are these, and there's no site, by the way, which will answer these questions for you. So that's another purpose for Tau Daily. But you have to really understand how will these subnet tokens benefit from the success of the subnet. Really make sure they will. I'll give Tau as an example. Tau doesn't make, the BitTensor network, Tau doesn't really make revenues in the traditional sense, but there is a very natural demand for the Tau token. Like if I want to start a subnet, and the reason I would, a subnet you could think of as like a company that's being built on top of BitTensor.

39:10That's oversimplifying, but think of it that way. So if I want to start a subnet because I can start a multi-billion dollar company potentially for one one thousandth of cost if I'm a subnet on Tau. If I want to start a subnet on Tau, I've got to stake a whole bunch of Tau. And then every validator on my subnet has to also stake a whole bunch of Tau. And some miners in some of the subnets have to stake Tau. So that's natural demand for Tau. So I might want to be a speculator. I might want to buy a Tau token because I think some subnets are going to be successful. And as the number of subnets increase, that's more and more demand for the Tau token because they need, you cannot start a subnet without the Tau token.

39:55So if I have the Tau token, I will benefit from that increase in demand as the number of subnets increase. Also, some of the subnets require Tau as payment for services. That's more demand. And meanwhile, all these Tau subnets that are staking TAU in order to do what they're doing, they're reducing supply because they're staking. Something like 80 or 90 % of TAU is staked. So that removes supply. So let's say the subnet cap goes from 128 to 1 ,000. The demand for TAU is going to increase so much, particularly as people see, oh, I could create a successful company this way. The demand for TAU tokens are going to increase so much.

40:39you can't even speculate how high the Tau token will go. It's not like a 10x. It might not even be 100x. It might be a 500x for all we know. It's ridiculous to even speculate, but it's going to increase a lot as the subnet cap goes higher. So that's natural demand for the Tau token. It's not like bullshit demand like the Uni versus Uniswap. There is a proposal out right now to increase the subnet limit to 256 and bring back subnet deregistrations. Do you see this as something that is necessary for Tau, the deregistrations and increasing the subnet limit? Yes, absolutely. Deregistrations is a tricky one.

41:25I could go either way on that. I almost don't have an opinion because it doesn't really matter that much. If you make the subnet limit infinite, then it doesn't matter if subnets are deregistered or not. That only matters if there's a finite supply of subnets. But the only reason the number of subnets was capped at 128 was to basically test if the Tau network could handle the load. But okay, now the Tau network can clearly handle the load. So they're increasing it to 256. Eventually, it'll be infinite. But every time they increase that subnet cap, the demand for Tau is going to go way up. And that's going to benefit the price of Tau a lot.

42:09And there's, of course, the Tau halving, which means there's going to be less Tau available. If I want to start a subnet and I need to buy Tau, well, there's going to be less Tau for sale available every day than there was because of the Tau halving. And all of these things are going to kind of happen around the same time in Q4 of 2025. So that's why I was so eager to start Tau Synergies, because now's the time. This is the window before these two big catalysts happen. This is the window to buy Tau. And I'm not trying to shill Tau. Nothing I say is going to move the price of Tau. It's just that I was excited to get in with a public company before these two major catalysts happened.

42:53Do you think there will be any specific subnet sectors sectors like compute or other sectors that are successful or will be successful or better designed for BitTensor? Well, compute's an amazing one. So what compute is, is basically kind of like the SETI project I mentioned earlier, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I don't have, let's say I want to build an AI company that requires, or I want to build an AI data center that requires 2 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Well, I don't have$100 million lying around to build that data center. And Elon Musk does, but only a few people do. But if I really need 2 ,000 GPUs, no problem.

43:39I can use Subnet 4, which is Targon, and they have 2 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs that are among the miners. Those miners are getting rewards every day. Targon gets to spend$0. They use their Subnet tokens as rewards. and they've aggregated 2 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs. And now if I'm creating my own chat GPT, I get to use all that paying one 100th the price I might have to pay like an open AI to use that compute. So that's one segment. Another segment might be like, oh, I want to put a chatbot on my website, a customer service chatbot on my website. I don't know how to, I'm a dentist. I don't know how to program AI.

44:24So how do I do this? Well, Shoots hosts all these open source AI models. And just with a little bit of no code instruction from the dentist, he can get a widget from Shoots, put it on his website. And now the customers can chat to this AI chat bot about their teeth. And boom, Shoots has thousands of customers. and that's an interesting case where they are using their revenues to buy back tokens, to burn tokens. And so if I own the tokens and I think Shute is going to have bigger and bigger revenues and the alpha will go up accordingly because they're burning the tokens, well, this is great for me because I'm getting the tokens cheap now.

45:12So that's a case where the tokenomics probably work out in favor of the investor if you think Schutz is going to grow as a business. How do you see the utility of those tokens with the buybacks? By the way, you asked about segments in AI. There's also, there's some amazing subnets out there. Like I love learning about AI by reading about the different and researching the different subnets. Like there's Yanez. I forget what number they are. 54. 54. for. So Yanez is, let's say I'm a bank and I need to make sure there aren't terrorists or criminals doing fraudulent activity in my bank. So there's all sorts of compliance laws.

45:58And then there's all sorts of tricks that the criminals do. And those laws and those tricks are constantly changing. The tricks are getting better and better and the laws are getting more and more complicated. So Yanez is an amazing use case of AI. They're creating, let's say, a data set of, the miners are creating, I should say, a data set of a million fake identities that might be hard to identify as criminals in a banking system. And they're creating fake identities, fake transactions, doing all this stuff. It's very complicated to do this, but they're using AI to do it. The miners are using, and the validators are picking the best AI-created data sets.

46:38and then banks are the customers and the subnet figures out if the banks are really being good at identifying which identities are fake and which aren't. What an amazing use case for a BitTensor subnet. OpenAI is never going to do that and this is potentially a multi-billion dollar industry. Like there are huge centralized competitors but those centralized competitors, they're capped on the amount of AI they can use, on the amount of employees they can have. Yanez is not capped. They could have millions of miners contributing these data sets. So fascinating use case. A use case that's definitely, Yanez is definitely going to end up being better than its centralized competitors.

47:22So that's just another segment. While we're on the topic of subnets, since you, I guess, partnered with a biotech company to make the child treasury company, what's your take on Metanova and what they're doing there, being one of the only biotech sector subnets? Metanova, so I've read about them and I know about them, and I think what they're doing is great, but I haven't done, to be fair, the deep dive. Like I'd really want to know, and I don't know the answer, so maybe you know the answers. Are there customers, like our pharmaceutical companies, lining up to be customers? I just don't know the answer.

47:59I haven't looked into deeply. Or is it just a research project? Sometimes I worry some of these subnets are just research projects that other people for fun want to mine just to help, but there's not an underlying business. Now, I think there could be an underlying business. That's why I'm asked. I mean, easily pharmaceutical companies could be the customers. I just don't know enough. So it could be very interesting, but I don't know. And I am scheduled to talk to them at some point. Yeah, they say pharmaceutical companies, drug development companies. So anybody that wants to develop drugs Yeah, it's kind of like how Google, I don't know what Google called it, but they won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to come up with new compounds.

48:43And again, anything scalable is ultimately going to beat the things that aren't scalable. Decentralized means scalable. Centralized means not scalable. And the proof of that is, look, Facebook is, people are asking, well, how can decentralized AI compete with Facebook, which is spending$250 million on bringing in AI programmers? Well, guess what? You can only bring in so many people if you're spending$250 million per programmer. Like that is not scalable. And there's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of AI developers out there. BitTensor can appeal to all of those and reward financially all of those and get the very best talent from all over the world.

49:27Ultimately, that's scalable. And I'll give you an example where decentralization, there's many examples, but I'll give you at least one example where decentralization conquered the world. So let's say 1990, every company, they needed to network their computers together and maybe network with the outside world. So they'd go to the store and they'd buy networking software. Well, that entire industry disappeared because of open source, decentralized networking called the internet. There was the TCP IP protocol, basically created by the Department of Defense in 1971, but then used by universities after that.

50:06And then suddenly, oh, here's this decentralized, scalable, infinitely scalable networking product. Every corporation in the world now uses that. The entire genre, the entire business category of networking software has completely disappeared. The entire job category of networking software engineers is gone. It's just over. And so that's what's going to happen with AI. Scalable decentralization is going to just wipe out centralization. Maybe not tomorrow because open AI is great. There's great stuff out there, but it has to happen eventually. Another area is news. Okay, I can turn on MSNBC for my news, but that's just like 12 reporters.

50:51I know what their bias is. I know what their news sources are. There's nothing interesting there. But Twitter is decentralized news. I don't need to get a job at MSNBC. It's permissionless. So I have permission to use Twitter to be a journalist and to spread news about something. And that has good sides and bad sides, but so does centralized news. And I would say Twitter and X has wiped out the news industry. It's just the news industry doesn't know it yet. So, you know, it's the end of the news industry. And we've been saying this for a decade, but we've seen it happen now. What do you think will be the new jobs that are created with the popularization of AI and these language models becoming widespread?

51:39Brad? So I was talking to, so a lot of people are afraid that AI is going to replace jobs and there's not going to be, unlike previous technological revolutions, there's not going to be new jobs to replace them. Like in the invention of cars, all the people who rode horse carriages became drivers. All the people who worked on things for horses, I guess, became the mechanics. With computers, all the people who typed on typewriters typed on computers and so on. So people are afraid the same thing's not going to happen, but that's not true. I talked to the CEO of freelance.org or freelance.com. It's the biggest freelancing site in the world.

52:27He said, we've gone from, since AI, we've gone from 6 million freelancers signed up to the site to 60 million. because now, let's say me, I've never been a graphic designer in my life, but let's say a record label advertises or posts on freelance.com, hey, I need a logo designer for my new album. Okay, well now I can use sophisticated AI programs to make an AI logo. In fact, I can make 20 logos in a day. Like this guy was telling me, it used to be a logo designer would make one logo every two weeks and charge$1 ,000. Now I can make 20 logos in a day, charge$30, and make so much more than I could have.

53:14I wouldn't have, A, I didn't have the skills to be a logo designer before. I didn't know how to use Photoshop. But now I could use MidJourney, and I could use 19.ai, Subnet 19 on BitTensor, to edit my photos very quickly. It's much faster than MidJourney. and so there's so many more opportunities now for solopreneurs, freelancers to use AI to do all the things I used to hire people to do which makes it seem like there's going to be less jobs but actually just creates more and more opportunities for people companies, every single company every single big company and every division in that company is now using AI to increase profits increase productivity and so on and they're using AI for that.

54:00But you need to hire people who know how to use AI, who've learned AI. This increase in productivity increases the amount of cash that's in society. So when a company becomes more productive, it means they can make their product cheaper and their profit margins can still stay healthy. They can even bring down the price of their products because technology is deflationary. They can bring down the price of their products but still have more money because their profits are higher. And then more cash in society means more business opportunities, means more houses will be bought, means more houses will be constructed, means more technologies will be created.

54:37I mean, the pace of AI innovation is enormous, which again means more jobs will be created. So the net effect is more money in society and more industries are developed, innovations faster and more jobs are created. In society broadly, outside of the AI category, what are some sectors that you think will benefit the most going into the future? From what? Just what do you think will see the most growth? What are the sectors you're essentially most bullish on? Well, obviously AI. AI is just unbelievable. I mean, we're doing this at 11 a.m. I've probably used Grok and actually 19.ai, you know, hundreds of times today so far.

55:25It's replaced Google search for me. It's replaced almost, you know, I used beautiful.ai to create a PowerPoint presentation. I don't even have Microsoft PowerPoint. And you can use all these AI tools to create beautiful PowerPoint presentations. So AI is, nothing is stopping that. And then what's happening is every other company is now using, every company now is an AI company. So Caterpillar makes tractors. All right, well, what does that have to do? Caterpillar is an AI company now because, oh, a tractor can now sense when there's weeds underneath it. So it'll, using AI, so it'll save on weed spray and make more money.

56:11Oh, a tractor is going to be self-driving. So now the farmer can use, while his self-driving tractor is spreading weeds more efficiently, but doing an auto driving, the farmer can focus on more business strategic goals and be more efficient with his time and grow his business more. So it's really if every company is turning into an AI company. And of course, crypto is growing huge. People will say, well, what do I need Bitcoin for? Why would I ever use Bitcoin? Well, guess what? The biggest use case right now of crypto, and it's been the biggest, it's also the oldest use case of crypto, is stablecoins.

56:52So Tether started in, I think, 2014. Last year, there were$27.6 trillion worth of stablecoin transactions, more than Visa and MasterCard combined. And Scott Bessette, the US Treasury Secretary, has come out and said, this entire industry, The stablecoin industry is growing by at least 15 to 20x within the next few years. So this is an enormous use case of crypto. By the way, that means infrastructure is needed. You can't just have a dollar bill without a bank, without a stock exchange, without a mortgage broker, without mortgage insurance. So huge industries developed around dollars. And so huge industries are going to slash cryptos are going to grow around stablecoins.

57:38So there's Aave and Syrup, which are the biggest lenders into stablecoins. There's Curve and Fluid, which are the biggest stablecoin exchanges. You know, there's ENA and Sky, which are cryptos that issue other stablecoins. There's, you know, Injective and Hyperliquid, which, you know, make exchanges for stablecoins. So you need, so all these crypto, so crypto, if stablecoin industry grows 10x, All the cryptos in the infrastructure are going to grow 50x. And then, of course, there's AI. There's decentralized physical infrastructure, aka AI in this case. So you have Tau, which is the leader in that.

58:18And AI is only going to grow from a$3 trillion industry to a$30 trillion industry. And decentralized AI is going to be a bigger and bigger percentage of that. Tau market cap is worth$3 billion. and we're talking about a percentage of an eventual$30 trillion industry. So that alone, Tau is going to be$100 ,000. It's going to be the leader in the space forever. So these are things I'm very excited about. Those are the two main industries, stablecoins and AI that I'm excited about. Stablecoins and AI? And by the way, biotech, of course, but that's like kind of an after effect of AI because of things like Metanova.

59:02Okay, because you think AI will just accelerate biotech to the point where we start seeing gene editing and all these other things. AI is an accelerator on every industry on the planet. Okay. And then to go into that biotech stuff, this is something that recently just caught me way off guard about you and really opened up my mind to how many different things you do is you're in the Brian Johnson documentary on Netflix. How did this happen? Well, you know, Brian Johnson made Venmo. And Venmo back in the day was very interesting because, again, it sort of avoids the intermediaries of the banks. And he had a very interesting story even back then.

59:46So I interviewed him for my book, Choose Yourself, which came out in 2013. More recently, Brian Johnson's been spending famously $2 million a year on improving his lifespan. And so I interviewed him on my podcast. The great thing about having a successful podcast, as you're realizing, is that you could just call anyone and say, hey, can I ask you some questions, please? And they're more likely to answer than if you don't have a podcast. So I called Brian and I said, hey, come on my podcast and I'll ask you all about what you're doing. And so he did. And he took, I didn't even know he was gonna do this, but I'm happy he did it.

1:00:19He took a video snippet from my interview with him on the podcast and put it on his Netflix documentary. So I was very proud that he did that.

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1:02:33Having a successful podcast like you do, what made you start your podcast? because you've been podcasting as far back as 2015, I believe. Yeah. Oh my God, 10 years of doing this. And I've done, I don't know, last year I was saying I did 1 ,500 episodes. I've done so much more now. But yeah, I just, I was very curious about people and I wanted a vehicle to just call them and ask, like I was saying. So for instance, when I was interested, you know, we talked earlier, I'm interested in chess. So I've had on Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest players in history. He was the world champion. I've had on Vishwanathan Anand.

1:03:13He was a world champion. I've had on Judith Polgar, the best female chess player in history. I was interested in stand-up comedy. I've had on the most famous stand-up comedians. I'm interested, you know, I've had on dozens of billionaires because I've been interested in entrepreneurship. I even wrote a book based on it called Think Like a Billionaire. I've had on dozens of during COVID I called up every well known epidemiologist doctor RFK Jr. was on my podcast I've had on and Marty McCary who now is the head of health or whatever he was on the podcast this was long before they were in the Trump administration and I have on people I agree with I have on people I disagree with.

1:04:05I don't know, name any industry. Any industry I've ever been curious about, I've had on the best people from that industry and interviewed them. I had on Danica Patrick, one of the greatest race car drivers ever. I've had on all sorts of actors, athletes, musicians. Coolio, my favorite rapper from the 90s, he's been on the podcast. So it's just been fun. Would you describe that as your philosophy of just kind of wandering around following your interests? Yeah, I mean, you don't want to, you know, it's not just your interest. To be good at something, you have to be obsessed. The person who's obsessed will always, if there's a competition, the person who's obsessed will always beat out the person who is not obsessed because obsession fills up, it's like a river that just fills up all the dry areas.

1:05:01And nothing could stop it. Whereas if you're only casually interested in something, you're not going to really be, you know, it's not going to be like 24 hours a day. You're thinking about it and want to learn and have questions and are curious. So I would say whatever I'm obsessed about, I pursue. And then also, what's the point of doing things you're not obsessed about? Now, it doesn't mean you're going to be obsessed every day. Like take Tao. I'm really obviously obsessed with this. And Tao Synergies is a public company. Tao is a crypto. When the prices go down five days in a row, I'm not necessarily a happy person.

1:05:41I like to see it go up every day like everyone else. But it empowers me forward because I am obsessed. Like, oh, I want to explain this to people so they see what I see. And so it helps me and it helps the Tao ecosystem too when there's more people like me and you and so on who are trying to explain this relatively complex idea and to make it as easy as possible for people to use. So, but yeah, when I become obsessed with something, like I became obsessed with stand-up comedy around 2015 or 2014, I forget the year. And I started literally from zero. So all day long, I would watch comedians on YouTube.

1:06:29And then every night, I did this. I eventually started doing this six nights a week, two times a night, performing stand-up comedy. So I've been up, whatever that is, for years I did this. So in one year, I would be going up, I don't know, 500 times performing. And then over years, you finally start to get good at something. It's not easy. There's not really a talent equation. You need to put in your hours. And I got good enough. I was performing all over the country and parts of Europe. Heck, someone just asked me to perform all over Hungary, but now I'm obsessed with something else. So I said no.

1:07:12But then I got obsessed with chess again as an older person starting in the pandemic. and I just started playing like much to the chagrin of my way. Some days I was playing 20 hours a day and then I started taking lessons and I started writing about chess for the major chess magazines. I've been on TV commentating about the world championship and it's been an interesting round circle, a round trip for me. So yeah, I love being obsessed in things, although that gives, when you're obsessed with something though, there's more opportunities for heartbreak. When you're obsessed with a girl and she says, and you're rejected, or she breaks up with you, you're heartbroken.

1:07:58And if I'm obsessed with chess and I lose a game, I'm heartbroken. If I'm obsessed with Tao and things aren't working out, I'd be heartbroken. So far, so good things are working out. How do you realize when you're obsessed with something? Because comedy kind of seems like way off to the side of everything else that you've done.

1:08:23Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't really know, but you just, you do something and you think to yourself, I have to do more of that. Obsession is similar to addiction. So like if you play a game of chess and you lose, well, I got to play at least one more now to win. And if you win, well, I'm just going to keep playing until I lose. so it becomes like an addiction and same thing with comedy if you go up and you don't perform well well I gotta go back tomorrow and prove that I'm better than I was tonight and when you do well it feels so good so much dopamine oh I gotta do this again tomorrow night and then to get good though you realize oh but I have to study it's not like it's easy all of these things are difficult so what does Louis C.K.

1:09:10do that I don't do and oh my god he's so good at this I got to find the next tier down and see what they do that I don't do. And then I take video of my comedy and then look at it later. What did I do wrong? Did I um and ah too much? Did I not move around the stage correctly? Am I using the mic correctly? Am I interacting with the audience? Was I sensing if the audience is responding to me? If one part of the audience is and one part of the audience isn't, how do I connect? It's called tribe building. How do I connect the two parts of the audience? Like you learn, every skill is really a combination of sub-skills.

1:09:46So to get good, there's no such skill as business skill. To get good at business, you need to be good at like, you know, understanding marketing, understanding leadership, understanding sales, which is different from marketing, understanding product development, understanding product market fit, understanding capital structure and fundraising. So there's all these sub-skills to getting good at this one skill. to understand crypto. There's a lot of different sub-skills, particularly with Tau. You have to understand what Tau is. How is the incentive mechanism built? What are the tokenomics? Understanding all the subnets.

1:10:21So there's all these sub-skills, chess, openings, endings, middle games, tactics, all these sub-skills. So obsession helps you passionately learn all that you don't know and figure out what it is you don't know and be humble about it too. So, you know, again, I mentioned to you earlier, I got worried I was interested in thing to thing to thing. So I was worried I was being a jack of all trades, master of none. Probably the only consistent thing throughout my whole career is that I've been a writer. So I've been writing books since the 90s. I write every single day and I read every day, good authors to try to get better at writing.

1:10:57That's the one thing that I've consistently done for let's say 30 years. And in writing, I think I read somewhere that you write 3 ,000 words every day. And you told me earlier, you have 25 published books. What started this obsession with writing? You know, sometimes the weirdest things start an obsession. Like, basically, when I was in college, there was this girl I had a crush on. And I had a friend who was a pseudo writer. like, oh, he read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and he read James Joyce's Ulysses and he always would talk that he was going to be a big novelist. And she felt, this girl I had a crush on fell in love with my friend who was a writer.

1:11:43And I was saying, you know what? I could be a better writer than him. And so I started reading a lot, like obsessively. And I started writing 3 ,000 words a day. And by the way, you have to have a little bit of, what's it called when you think you're better than you are? It's this paradox. Shoot, I forget what it is. But I definitely thought I was a better writer than I was for many, many years. For probably like five, six years. I would write 3 ,000 words a day thinking I was God's gift to writing when I was horrible. I wrote novel after novel after novel. None of them published. And I couldn't look at my own stuff and say, this is horrible.

1:12:22Now I can see it was horrible. But that kept me going. You have to have a little bit of this foolishness to keep going because you're always bad at something when you start, but you need to continue. And you need the dopamine of being good to continue. So you have to fool yourself into thinking you're better than you are. Same thing with comedy. The only way I really know that I got at least to mediocre level of comedy is that other people would ask me to tour with them. And so then I figured, okay, I'm getting validated a little bit. You can't always choose yourself for everything. You have to have somebody give you feedback and tell you you're not as good as you think you are, or you are getting pretty good.

1:13:07Having that delusional self-confidence of thinking you're better than you are, is that actually a problem? How much should people value the opinion of others here to validate what they're doing? You can't really value anybody's opinion ever. You have to, you can listen, and then you could judge for yourself. is there a good reason behind their opinion? So, you know, sometimes you have enough experience in an area to say, you know what? This person did not give me what I think is a good opinion. Like he didn't back it up or she didn't back it up. And so then you really have to kind of validate the opinion for yourself and use sources and learn.

1:13:45And this is a great use case for AI is to learn something very quickly. But it's really hard to know if anything is true. Like, nobody really, I can give you a million reasons why tau, for instance, might go up, but someone else give me a million reasons why it's going to go down. And I will have self-doubt until I research and study and you try to steel man your opinion. So steel man means, let's say I stand for something. I should argue the opposite case as well as or better than I'm arguing for my opinion. So this way I learn what the other side is and I try to figure out if that's true or not.

1:14:30So I can make the steel man case why Tau is going down, but I've steel manned it a lot and I'm more on the side that Tau is going up quite a bit, but same thing with Bitcoin. But it's very hard. It's hard even to validate your own opinion, let alone others. Another thing I read about you in my research, you can tell me if this is true or not, is you founded or co-founded 20 companies and 17 of those 20 failed. Yeah. I mean, now it's probably a few more on either side of that. But my first big company did succeed. I was making websites for Fortune 100 companies. Like I made AmericanExpress.com.

1:15:15I made TimeWarner.com, HBO.com. Every gangster rap record label, I made their website. This is in the 90s. Nobody had websites until I made them. And I sold that company, made a lot of money. And then I went completely broke. And it was so depressing. I had generational wealth. And I was super rich. and then I went completely broke. And when I say broke, I had$143 in my bank account at the bottom and no money anywhere else. I had to really rebuild from scratch and nobody was helping me because everyone helps you on the way up and they're all your friend when you have a lot of money. When you're going down, people smell the failure and they just stay far away.

1:16:02Nobody's your friend, not even family members. And so I had to really, I got depressed, even suicidal, and I had to really bounce back. And so one thing I just kind of stumbled into doing was this daily exercise I still do, which is I write down 10 ideas every day. And they don't have to be good ideas. In fact, 99.9 % of them are really bad ideas. But you always, the ideas are a muscle. And if you don't use your muscles, like if you just stay in bed for two weeks, you'll need physical therapy to walk again. So muscles atrophy really fast. So I would say most people have atrophied idea muscles.

1:16:46So I exercise mine by writing 10 bad ideas a day. And every now and then, my idea muscle is exercised enough that when I need a good idea, I can usually come up with a good idea. Yeah. So, but I've been doing this for almost 24, 23 years now. And I realized after a few months of doing it, I was no longer depressed. I was starting to get actual opportunities based on my ideas. Like I would send ideas to other people and say, hey, why don't you do these ideas? And they would contact me back and say, hey, I'll give you money and you do these ideas. And so I started generating opportunities for myself.

1:17:25And that's what happens to this day. hey, that's how I found, you know, that's how I started doing Tao Synergies is I wrote to my friend who had this shell, this public company with$15 million cash in it. And I said, why don't you do these ideas? And he said, let's talk. And we spoke and I hadn't spoken to him in years before that. And we decided together, let's do Tao Synergies. So every now and then one of these ideas you write down in your notepad is gonna flourish and turn into something worth millions of dollars to you. Another interesting fact I found out about you on my research journey was you hosted a web series on HBO in the mid-90s?

1:18:07Yeah. What was that about? How did that happen? That was the funnest. That's like the only time I had a regular job was for HBO, which was the television company. And HBO was kind of known for its edgy programming. and now everybody is edgy, but HBO was like the one network in the US that was really gritty and edgy and urban. And I built, so I was, my title there, I was junior IT programmer and I was the lowest person in the hierarchy and nobody on the entertainment side cared about a programmer, but there was this new thing, the web. So I offered to do HBO's website And they said, no, we need the entertainment side involved.

1:18:56So I chose myself. I just made the website for them on a weekend. And then when they came into the office, I not only made their website, but I made an intranet for them. I helped up everything in their Oracle databases and put a Netscape browser on every computer. And suddenly people could access the cafeteria menu, the human resources people database, the film database right on Netscape, which was the browser, or it was Mosaic then, Mark Andreessen's browser he made as a student. And then they said, okay, you can make, and I built a design for a website. And they said, okay, you can make the official website.

1:19:34And then I went up to the CEO of HBO. Again, I was lowest per, I like walked into his office and he looked at me and he's like, who are you? And I said, look, I'm building the website. why doesn't HBO do a web show kind of gritty like your TV shows? And he said, I don't care. Do whatever you want. And so I went back to my boss and I said, look, Jeff Bukas, the CEO, said I had to do this. And my boss was like, okay, I guess you got to do this. So I made a web show. I called it 3 a.m. And it was about what people were up to at 3 in the morning in New York City on a Tuesday night. Like there's no real reason to be out at 3 a.m.

1:20:17on a Tuesday night unless you were up to something no good. And I did that for almost three years, that website for them. I would do 20 interviews every Tuesday night at 3 in the morning outside. I'd see people doing interesting things, and I'd say, hey, what are you up to? And then I would get designers design around it. I would pick four, do the transcriptions, take videos. The video wasn't popular on the web then, but I would try to do video. And then HBO asked me to shoot an actual TV pilot for it, which we did. Didn't work out as a series. But it was really a fun three years doing that project.

1:20:55And that project got so popular. I mean, Time Magazine featured it that it got me people calling, hey, can you do my website like this? And I was an employee at HBO. But at night, I would work on AmericanExpress.com and other people's websites. So I was making$40 ,000 a year as a programmer at HBO. But then American Express was paying like$200 ,000 for a website. And it was like unbelievable. And so I just, but it took me 18 months to jump. I was so scared. It took me 18 months to jump from my full-time job at HBO. I had 18 employees in 18 months that were working on my company, Reset. And finally, I joined this full-time.

1:21:39And then a year later, I sold it. why do you think you had such the hesitancy to jump into full time? Because kind of I wanted to do a TV show also. And I didn't care about money so much. I was torn between building a business and making a lot of money and making a TV show. I wanted to turn 3am into a TV show. Then I had other ideas for TV shows. And I've been working on TV show ideas forever. I feel like now is the first time I've kind of given up on the idea of doing a TV show. It never really worked. Fox Business offered me a TV show and I said, no, that was the closest I got. You didn't like Fox?

1:22:23You didn't want to be a part of their network? At the time, I was on CNBC three times a week talking about stocks. I was a little loyal to CNBC, which was a mistake. I should have maybe done Fox, but there's always regrets. People say, oh, I don't regret anything. I regret almost everything. That is true. Not a lot of people are willing to admit they regret things. There's always things you could have done wrong. For instance, I was excited about Bitcoin in 2013. I got some Bitcoin, but it was so easy to have gotten a lot more Bitcoin. and I just didn't do it. But now I have a lot of tau, so we'll see.

1:23:04It's a second chance, right? Yeah, and look, I've built up a bunch of businesses. I've done okay, but nothing like if I had bought simply a thousand Bitcoin for nothing back then when I was even excited about Bitcoin. Yeah, crazy to think about. What would you say is the most, if you had to pick a singular point in your career, What would you say is the most pivotal point for you or the most important point throughout your career? I don't know. There's a lot of pivotal points because there's ups and downs. I've gotten broke not once, not twice, but at least three or four times after having millions and then going to broke and then millions.

1:23:46There's three skills to money. There's making it, keeping it, growing it. And for a long time, I was good at making it, but I was not good at keeping it and growing it. So I would say each pivotal point was A, when I learned how to make it, B, when I learned how to keep it, and C, when I learned how to grow it, knock on wood, because that's a skill that's ongoing. So those are all pivotal points. Like this concept of writing 10 ideas a day down, that was pivotal because maybe I would have killed myself otherwise. Like if I didn't start feeling enthusiastic about ideas again, instead of being depressed and regretting losing all this money when I had two babies to feed and I was losing my house and everything.

1:24:28So, I mean, that was a long time ago, but that was a pivotal moment. And a pivotal moment was when, you know, I convinced my friends at what was then Synaptogenics to rename to Tau Synergies, forget about this Alzheimer's drug and let's just go all in on Tau. Like that was a pivotal moment. So there's quite a few pivotal moments like that. And I'm going to ask you one last question here today. As someone that's lived a very varied life, done a lot of different things, been in a lot of different careers, had a lot of different obsessions, what advice would you have for people when deciding where to spend their time?

1:25:11How should they spend their time? What should they be obsessed about? Well, it's not what they should be obsessed about, but how to cultivate an obsession, how to find what you're obsessed about. So, and there's no direct answer. You just have to expose yourself to a lot of things. Like go to the bookstore and is there any section where you would be willing to read every single book in that section? That might indicate you're obsessed with that area. And then you have to brainstorm, what can I do to further this obsession? Like I was talking to Dan Carlin. He has a very popular podcast called Hardcore History.

1:25:48So he was obsessed with history, but he wasn't, I think he was a college driver. He wasn't like a historian. And his mom suggested him, why don't you just start a podcast about history? You're so into it. And he's like, ah, you know, I'm not a professional historian. But he chose himself. He started the most popular podcast about history. And he really, he only does one every like two or three months. He really researches every topic. and it's great. So sometimes you find an obsession, but then you have to figure out how to monetize or do something with that obsession also. But stand-up comedy, I never would have known I was obsessed with doing it if I didn't fight every fear in my body.

1:26:33I remember I was doing a podcast episode with Steven Dubner, who wrote Freakonomics, and we decided we both were interested in stand-up comedy, but we were really afraid to do it. So we rented out a hall. We invited everybody who was listening to the podcast, which was turned out to be, you know, whoever was available in New York City that night, like hundreds of people. And we did five minutes of stand-up each and I became obsessed. Like I got to do this again. I got to do this a million more times. I really want to get good at this. so you just have to try things and don't be afraid to experiment so one, like an example experiment is I needed to get better at comedy if you're not good, you can't get on stage it's like a chicken or the egg thing so one time I did an experiment I went on the subway in New York City at rush hour and I videotaped myself doing stand-up on the subway car And I was super scared, but I did it.

1:27:36I did it like 50 times that day. I switched cars every stop. And that was just an experiment to see if I could do it and maybe learn something. So just don't be afraid to experiment with just... Experiments are cheap. The nature of an experiment means you're going to test something super cheap. Like I spent zero money and suddenly I was on 50 stages against a real hostile audience. They did not like me. And so I got a lot of experience very quickly doing an experiment and gaining knowledge. So don't be afraid to experiment occasionally. You know, I wanted to learn Kickstarter. And I was also curious about why, this is 2017, 2018, why did Trump want to buy Greenland?

1:28:20Like that was the craziest thing. He tweeted he wanted to buy Greenland. I never saw someone tweet they want to buy an entire country. And I wanted to experiment with writing. So all three things combined, I created a Kickstarter or a crowdfunding campaign to buy Greenland. So I had to do all the research about Greenland. I had to learn all the crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, whatever. It was interesting writing because you're writing in the Kickstarter format. Like, oh, here's why I want to buy Greenland. But also, if you donate$10, you could be a Duke. If you donate$1 ,000, we'll name a holiday after you and so on.

1:29:04So that was just an experiment. It could have gone huge or it could just be, oh, I wasted a day, but I learned all about Greenland and Kickstarter and something new about writing. And it was the latter. But experiments will always gain you knowledge and help you point to what you're obsessed with. That was a long answer. No, it's beautiful. James, I appreciate you coming on the podcast today. I'm sure they'll be around too in the future. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

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