Cooper Turley | Layer Zero

Cooper Turley is all in, all the time. He’s been that way since he was a kid. In the crypto space, it truly seems like he’s everywhere at once. He knows everyone and has his hands in nearly every relevant project. However, none of this happened by chance. Cooper is a champion of the grinder mindset, and it echoes through everything he touches. His approach to his career, relationships, and self-improvement buzzes with a productive energy to build and bring value to all that he does. We all have something to learn from Cooper Turley. As crypto continues to mature, it’s clear that big things are lined up for Cooper. We can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. ------ 📣 ONJUNO | Crypto from your Checking Account! https://bankless.cc/OnJuno ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:39 Cooper Turley & Runescpe 9:22 Grinding & Sports 13:18 Video Starts 15:19 College & Music 18:36 Mindfulness & Schedule 25:38 Crypto in 2017 33:26 Bear Market Building 40:59 Working on Everything 45:31 🔥_🔥 51:08 Hollywood Cooper IRL 57:48 Bull Market Behavior 1:00:49 Intersecting Crypto & Culture 1:05:14 A Horizontal Approach 1:12:01 On the Road 1:16:21 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Cooper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My skill set is knowing everyone and knowing everything about every project. And if you try and put me into a box and say that I can only work on this parameter of work, it's never going to work for me because my skill set is being everywhere.

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people. And each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypher punks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm talking with Cooper Turley. And Cooper and I have a pretty similar timeline for when we got into crypto. We were both at the ETH Denver 2018 conference. And that conference was pretty, I think, impactful for both of us. It's funny that we didn't actually meet there. And Cooper tells a story of learning how to grind through the bear market.

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  And overall, learning how to grind inside of the crypto industry and the fruits that can be borne out of grinding. And so I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned here with just getting a grasp over one's mental functioning, mental abilities. Cooper is a big fan of mindfulness and meditation, and then using that to just funnel energy into building and just contributing value. Cooper also tells a story of rather than building something in specific and doubling down on one specific project, Cooper spreads himself horizontally over a large number of projects. And that's enabled him to be a great connector of many, many people and just come to know a lot of people.

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  We also get into his move towards LA and helping grow and build out the crypto scene in LA, which is a very unique and different crypto scene than anywhere else that we've seen and very emblematic of where we are with NFTs and culture coming into crypto. And Cooper is definitely leading that effort for sure. So let's go ahead and get right into our conversation with Cooper Turley. We recorded this in person at Metaverso. So hence the kind of echoey conference room in a hotel. So sorry about that, but I think you guys will. Enjoy this conversation no matter what. So let's go ahead and get right into it. But first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs.

• 2:22David Hoffman?

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• 3:04David Hoffman?

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• 3:45David Hoffman?

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• 4:27David Hoffman?

  No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. What's up, Cube?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Hey, man.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  How's it going?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  I'm doing well.

• 4:42David Hoffman?

  Dude, we're in Puerto Rico, and it's been a fantastic time.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  It has been a fantastic time. It's the end of the conference circuit, so we're in and out of the bank here.

• 4:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the end of the conference, I mean, for 2021.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  No more conferences in 2021.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I gotta go back and work.

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  For people that are following you around, they might think that you work at conferences.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Basically. I pretty much do it this way. I think it's a part of the game, is just being present at all the events that people are at.

• 5:05David Hoffman?

  And I think that's something that you are uniquely, what you are a unique contribution to crypto is, like, you are the guy that's there. You are the guy that's present. I definitely want to end there, but let's just go ahead and do the casual all the way back. Where'd you grow up?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  I grew up in Philadelphia, outside the city. I grew up playing a lot of sports, a lot of video games. I was really into collecting Pokemon cards, actually. So back in high school, I started selling Pokemon cards on eBay. Got a really big knack for music at the time, and was really into curation, finding early acts, finding new collections. And I was graduating high school, and I kind of wanted to do something new. A lot of my friends were going to state schools and getting ready to join a frat and whatnot, but I kind of had this passion for music and sort of creative activities, and that brought me out to Colorado, where I went to school, and just got a lot deeper into the music game.

• 5:49David Hoffman?

  When you were collecting, everyone kind of collected Pokemon cards as a kid, but with the other trends or fads or things that you were into, was that like, you picked those out yourself, you discovered that yourself, or was it like, things that other people were doing? How did you curate your own interests?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a close friend group of mine. Me and my friends had a lot of UVO cards growing up, but I think the unlock for me was realizing you could buy other people's collections on eBay. I was like, oh, it's not only me and my collection in my basement, it's everyone's collection in their basement around the world. And a lot of the times, people wouldn't think about it, they would just wholesale be like, I have 10,000 cards, they don't want to sort through them, starts at 99 cents, go ahead. And there was this game we played of finding the best collection, knowing which cards were hidden in that one corner of the photo that were worth like $20, which Was a big card and then kind of taking a guess on it. And so you would go wholesale, buy a whole collection for $400, break it down into its parts. Have a great reputation on eBay, list each card individually with like name, price, condition of the card, series it's from. And just getting to understand the game became really fun because when you were doing it with friends,

• 6:46Speaker 00

  it was very easy to collect it and you know, just have a fun time recording it basically.

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  So I think people listening to that will be like, oh yeah, he's an NFT guy. And you are an NFT guy, but you were in crypto well before NFTs too. So I think that's kind of interesting that you have like a very like NFT conducive background.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 7:02David Hoffman?

  But you got into crypto and before NFTs were really what they are today.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say my first foray into NFTs was RuneScape. You know, it's a game that I got very good at. I had a really awesome inventory. I had a Santa hat. I was grinding fishing all the time. I had like billions and billions of gold and was just doing all of these fun games that were essentially NFTs. You know, obviously you couldn't export it. I've never done, earned a dollar from my RuneScape account, but that act of kind of grinding and collecting rare items in a digital game is always fascinating to me.

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  Dude, RuneScape was where I learned farming. I farmed the like the essence things that you had to turn into spells. And like I was, I was a warrior guy, but I didn't, so I didn't use any of those stuff. But I would have to farm that stuff because other people had to buy them.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:40David Hoffman?

  Uh, and that's kind of what we're seeing now with Axie Infinity, which is kind of interesting.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's multifaceted. I mean, RuneScape, you had combat, which you could train. You had like, you know, mage you could train, you could do prayer. And then there's like herb lore and then there's obviously fishing and wood cutting and fire making and sort of, even like later as the game developed, they had like hunter and stuff like that. So the cool part about that game is you could go so deep into one character's story arc. It wasn't just like main objective, like play this one storyline and then just like finish the game. Just infinite, you know, design space, which is what I think we're seeing with NFTs where, NFTs as a sector is so big. There's so many ways you can go into it. You can go on music NFTs, you can go on photo NFTs, you can do PFPs. You know, and I think what we're seeing now is regardless of what skills that you have, there's really room for you to grow and develop your skills.

• 8:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think people need to be reminded more and more and more that NFTs is just a token format. Like it's just a format, like it's up to you. Like people's like, oh yeah, I do NFTs. As in like it's a profile picture NFT or an art NFT, but like, no, no, no, no. Like that's just like what we're talking about entities right now. Like it goes off in every single direction.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Totally. Another one that just came to mind for me was Call of Duty and how you can do Prestiging and get gold guns.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  I think that's an interesting example of NFTs where it was like play to earn, but in like a very like a social capital type way. When you had gold guns, it was like you were just legit, like they had no financial value. You could never trade them or anything like that. When you saw someone with a gold gun, especially when the games came out, you know, it was a race to get to that first gold gun. I would go to GameStop with my friends at midnight on the release parties and do completely degenerate stuff. But I remember it's such a social experience to be like, get the game, go home, and then you just see who played the most the next day. My friends would skip school and then you wake up, how are you first prestige? It's game about 24 hours ago, you know, it was just a grind, just, you know, better off your friends. And I think that's a lot of what we see in crypto today.

• 9:23David Hoffman?

  Cooper, I think a lot of people will know you as a grinder. So when, when did you learn to grind? Was this something that you were born with? Or like, what was your first grinding experience?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Sports, 100%. My dad was always my coach growing up. And so he instilled a really hard discipline around like training and work ethic. And so starting back as early as football, you know, like fifth grade or something like that, my team ended up going to Disney World and I was the quarterback of that team. And so leading up to that season, we were training every single day outside doing sprints and ladders and whatnot. Baseball, Little League, I was always going to the bounty cages, doing like ground balls, pitching workshops, you know, and then basketball in high school was the main sport that I stuck with. And so I'd be shooting in the gym every single day doing two hour sessions, got an amazing jump shot, you know, and do different routines with people on my team. And I don't know, I just kind of learned that there's, there's time that you put in where people aren't watching. And I think that's what really like develops your skills and makes

• 10:12Speaker 00

  you go that extra mile. And me being able to have that experience from something like competitive sports, to be able to take that and go to that next level and really be able to demonstrate that in a public setting was really fascinating to me. Cause I love this idea of playing with my friends and everyone's like, I'm not the most athletic guy, you know, I'm pretty skinny. It's like, I'm not super fast. Like I don't have like great athletic abilities, but I just work hard, you know? And I think what I learned is the harder that you work at a specific skill, regardless of what it is, if you put in enough time into it, you're going to get good at it. So it just taught me that there's beauty in being good at something because the more that you work on it, you're going to get better. And when you are going through those early steps of learning something, it's okay to be terrible at it because you know that so long as you keep putting in time and effort, there's a high likelihood you're going to be pretty good at it eventually.

• 10:52David Hoffman?

  The putting in work while no one's watching, I really like that line. What really matters in my mind for people that engage in that sort of behavior is they have to have this internal dialogue. Because like you, people can grind and get good at sports. And like if you practice anything, you'll get better at it. But like if you don't have the internal motivation to do that in the first place, like then you're actually not gonna make it, right? So like you, you clearly you can grind and clearly that you're, you're talking about um just like again, creating a work ethic. But why? Like why? What motivates you? Do you want, do you just like to beat people or you're competitive? Or just like what's up? Do you just like performance? Like why, why do you grind?

• 11:29Speaker 00

  I wanna be the best, you know, at everything that I do. And I think um I'm really driven by people that care a lot about what they work on and what they do. And I think that it's less about beating other people. I am competitive in what I do, but I think it's about being the best version of myself. I think there's something that I'm passionate about. I want to perform at the highest ability of whatever that is.

• 11:46David Hoffman?

  So like when you're, when you're taking uh you know, free throws and you, you miss a little bit more than average. You're like, oh, I could have done better. Like I have my own personal record that I could beat. That's what you're, you're benchmarking to against yourself?

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, in high school I was ninety-three out of a hundred for free throws. I think I would do three throws and if I got under ninety, I'd be really, really pissed.

• 12:02David Hoffman?

  Nice. Was that a property, a character that you were just born with, a characteristic?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  I think that I grew into it. I think um you know, like going back to the earliest memories I have, like playing sports. I was always good at like soccer, like indoor soccer and stuff like that. But I think it wasn't until I started to be like social systems in schools that I kind of started forming an identity around being good at sports. And that just being part of like my identity. And I think when I realized that that was part of my identity, I was like, if this is gonna be what I'm known for, I might as well be good at it. And I think from there it just kind of developed. What I'm really thankful for is in high school, you know, middle school and early high school was sort of like the, the instilling of grinding. But then towards the end of high school, I was still practicing every day, but I started to have more creative friends come into my life. So the ones that I was playing video games with, the ones that I was trading Pokemon cards with and eventually going to concerts with.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  And that balance of like during the mornings on in the gym, like in middle school, I would go to my middle school gym before school started. It was like six in the morning and I'd be shooting hoops before school started for twenty minutes. And then school would start and I'd go to class sweating. And then in high school, I would come out of that and um had friends that we could just go to concerts with and just do fun stuff. And I think that that balancing act of realizing like, okay, it's okay to not be grinding all the time and find something that you're really passionate about and enjoy. I think that that was a great way to balance both of those uh, both of those lives that I was living at the time.

• 13:18David Hoffman?

  Do you remember your first like a dopamine hit when you were like were trying to get in grinding on something and you're like yes, that was awesome like fuck yeah, I want more of that. What was your first moment like that?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  I remember one was hitting a home run in the All-Star game in baseball.

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  Where it was like.

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  Oh, in the All-Star game too, nice.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Like all the best people in the league and just like ripped it because I was having just a really fun time with my friends who are all there. It's very social. My friend had a new bat that I'd never used before and I was like picked it up and I was like. This thing's pretty sick, you know, and then came out and just fucking cranked one, absolutely cranked it. It was such an electric feeling. I'd say baseball one that had the best memories. I remember we were in a. The playoffs one year for districts and we were playing the team that ended up going on to the Little League World Series. It was the year prior to that. And they had their best pitcher playing and um cranked a home run off of that. One of my best friends from high school growing up, he was pitching. He was this incredible pitcher, ended up being the quarterback at Harvard. And I hit a home run off of him and it was just these kind of examples where like I was put in a position where I don't think I was expected to.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Perform as well as I did, but then something just happened and like that extra that extra grind, you know, where it's like an incredible pitcher who was just throwing darts and it was like everyone was striking out and then I just like prayed. I'm just like. I'm just gonna swing on this one. I don't know what's gonna happen. Just knock out of the park. I was like, what the hell? Like this small puny kid and just like banging out home runs. Like, how is it even possible, you know? Like those moments to me were the ones that uh just stuck with me very, very much.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  And I'm sure there were hours of batting cage time behind that homerun, huh?

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And it was when no one was there, like bless my dad because he would go with me like hours every day and just like allow me to hit as much as I wanted, you know, buckets and buckets of balls. We pick them all up, run it back again and uh. It was just fun, you know, it was just fun. And when I'd be able to bring people with me to do it, some people would like complain or they wouldn't be there. And then I think it was good seeing like who really cared? Like who was my age, like? Ten to fifteen but wanting to be spending hours of their free time on a summer day going and practicing and getting better rather than just like. Doing some other stuff and just blowing time off.

• 15:08David Hoffman?

  Is this genetic at all? Or is this a property or characteristic that your parents have too?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  My dad was a professional tennis player, so yeah.

• 15:15David Hoffman?

  Oh, okay. All right. So it definitely runs in the family, at least a little bit. Uh, you went to uh, you went to college in Denver?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what was that like?

• 15:24Speaker 00

  It was fantastic. That was my music chapter in my life. So like I said, end of my high school career, I was getting more into music. I was captain of my varsity basketball team, but like the whole time I was playing basketball, I was also developing a friend group in music. So we were going to festivals, we were going to shows in the city, going to see like Avicii's, Ed's Dead. You know, a bunch of these like early EDM acts and just having such a fun time like on the side of sports. Cause my sports friends are my sports friends and then my music friends are my music friends. And uh, that's why I kinda got more into like my creative self and so we were going to these shows and like talking about like art and. You know, just music and just kinda getting into a different culture. And when I heard about um, Colorado and specifically this venue called Red Rocks, I got really excited about it. I went out to Colorado, went to a show for an artist named Pretty Lights, just had this awesome, awesome experience there.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  And I was like, there is none of my friends going to Colorado, not a single one of my close friends. And I was like, you know what, like. I wanna change pace. Like, I don't know what it is, but something there just feels right to me. And so I just. Full on sent it out there and just totally carved out this new identity for myself around music and sort of being in that scene.

• 16:22David Hoffman?

  Uh, how did sports come with you to college or did you kinda just, you know, do it as a, on the side as a hobby?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Just as a hobby. I would go to the rec center in Boulder and uh, my rec team won like one of the championships and. I was just so good in my freshman year of college, cause I kept growing. I was like six, six foot, six foot one, six foot two, my senior year of.

• 16:41David Hoffman?

  You're still growing in college?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I got to be like six five my freshman year of college. And so I was off the backboard dunks like.

• 16:47David Hoffman?

  Doing insane stuff, you know, and so like when I played rec with like everyone there, it was super, super fun. Uh, what'd you go to, what'd you major in?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  I majored in music business. I started in accounting. My mom's an accountant and I loved um, math. Like, I think it's very fascinating to me. So accounting was something that I was very purposefully inspired by. Like, it seemed like a great career choice. You know, obviously CPA, it pays well, it's a very stable career. And so I started out in the business school in Colorado Boulder. As I spent a couple of years there, I kinda realized like I'm way more driven by this creative side of my life. And so I ended up transferring to music business degree, which I graduated with from Denver.

• 17:18David Hoffman?

  What year, uh, what was the year that you swapped majors?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  I'd say my sophomore or junior year, probably my junior year, yeah. Cause I remember the first two year, um, got really into smoking weed. My med card and just got very into that world like had an operation with my friends and we were learning how to grow and stuff like that. And then I was going to shows on the side and just like very much in this like hippie crypto or you know like weed world. That was like all this Colorado vibe.

• 17:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  And so it took me a year or two to really find like balance in that because I came fresh out of like varsity basketball team like grind every day. Like pretty straight edge, didn't really do that much stuff to like go to Colorado like smoking weed every day. And like I am completely sober now. I don't do any drugs. I don't drink, but that period of my life, it was like every day. And it was very social experience. I think that was the takeaway from it is like I was meeting so many new people. I kind of came to this new school and I realized no one knows anyone. This is all a blank slate. Like, how do I meet the most people possible? I was like, oh wait, everyone in Colorado loves to smoke weed. And so I got my med card and just became the guy to hang out with if you wanted to smoke. And so I'd have like 10 people come to my house who do these like big circles. I have like this volcano vape and just go like super deep on like all this stuff. And like, great that I don't remember 99% of what those conversations were.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  But I think a lot of my social skills that I have today and being able to meet new people are largely attributed to me being comfortable, going into new environments and just completely chilling out with people I'd never met before on a very deep level.

• 18:36David Hoffman?

  Interesting. How did you get your grind fix if you kind of put sports, not not completely down, but kind of deprioritized sports? Did your grind grind fix go somewhere else?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it definitely did. I think um I think my grind fix at that time was just meeting as many people as possible and becoming one with myself spiritually. I got into meditation at the time. I started to meet a lot more people. I started to think a lot more about like myself and my standing in the world. And whereas my grind phase in high school was very much, I want to be the best at this specific sport. My grind phase in college was like, I want to be the best version of myself. And so I would wake up every morning feeling fantastic. I was practicing meditation. I was doing a lot of hikes and getting out into the wilderness. I was stargazing and going to see shooting stars and stuff like that. And I think I just got to see a lot more of the world from that side of things. Whereas like physically, I performed well in my life at one point. Spiritually, I want to work on myself. I want to understand what it means to be one, in touch with myself, like understand my feelings, understand how to connect with other people

• 19:31Speaker 00

  and just get to have a better relationship with myself in the world.

• 19:34David Hoffman?

  Was this something that you felt was lacking or was it something that you just wanted to?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  I think everyone's lacking in it. You know, I think that it takes a very specific type of focus to recognize that spirituality is important in your life. And granted, that does come from a place of often taking drugs to get to that point. But I think that for a lot of people, they're not very awake. You know, like, I think they go about their day to day, but they're not in touch with how they feel about themselves and how they think. They just are on autopilot all the time. And that point in my life was like, I want to understand why I'm thinking the way that I am. And I want to understand why I'm feeling the way I am, and I want to understand why things set me off in the way that they do. And through that process, I just got to a point of being very comfortable with who I was. And through that, I was able to just make a lot of friends, because I had this very vibrant energy to myself and was very excited about sharing that with the world.

• 20:17David Hoffman?

  Interesting. So, having a goal of just being in tune with yourself is fantastic, but also, it's kind of, that's kind of like having a goal of being happy. You can't actually even have the goal to be happy. You can't go, go straight for happiness. You have to, like, enjoy the guitar and then get good at the guitar. The guitar makes you happy. So after, after the, the plan was to become closer to yourself, what, was that, was that a means to an end for something? Or was there anything else at the time that you were thinking about while you were on the search to understand Coop?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  I think that's a great way of putting it. I don't think I was striving to be happy. I was aiming to be present. And by being present, I was often very happy. You know, especially going to these shows, I developed a crew of people that were always going to the same concerts, and I would see them at these shows, and I would go and dance for like hours on end and have really intimate connections with the artists and the musicians and start to really understand their career and the culture behind it. And I think my, you know, as I said earlier in the conversation, I want to be the best at what I do. And at that point in time, it was music as a topic, and music as a topic meant finding the best artists early on in their career. And so for me, going to five concerts a week and getting to know everyone in that scene and all the up and coming artists, that was my end state. It's like, I want to be able to find all the best music as soon as possible and be known as the guy that always has the best taste in music.

• 21:27David Hoffman?

  How has focusing on, um, just identifying yourself for your own personal understanding of who you are, how has that impacted how you, um, uh, meet and understand other people?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  It's taught me a lot of empathy, you know? I think I'm able to just like really connect with anyone at a very deep level. I love the saying, you should treat the CEO the same way that you treat the janitor. So regardless of who I'm talking to, whether or not someone offered to me, I want to be very present in those conversations. When people are acting in certain ways or as I'm building longer relationships, it's allowed me to just really see them for who they are very quickly. And so as I'm making decisions about how to spend time with them or projects to work on, I think I'm able to delegate focus and attention very well, because I understand kind of what drives people and sort of what they're good at and what they might need some help with.

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna, how, what about concentration? How's concentration with you? How's that look like?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  It's amazing, honestly. I mean, meditation is literally the reason why I'm able to stay so focused in what I do. Um, started about five years ago. I've missed five days over the course of five years. I meditate twice a day at this point. In that period of sobriety, I feel more focused than I've ever had in my life.

• 22:26David Hoffman?

  Uh, what's, how long, what's a meditation look like for you? Twenty minutes, sitting on a pillow, just thinking?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically.

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  Or lack of thinking?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, lack of thinking. Thinking about thinking, I think is the way to put it.

• 22:36David Hoffman?

  Metacognition, yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  I would say around ten to fifteen minutes is where it generally ends up. I have a playlist called Peaceful Meditation on Spotify. Throw that on shuffle, sit there and just kind of feel myself. You know, think about the thoughts that I'm thinking about, think about, um, what I have on the plate for that day. Often think about a pretty good tweet, if I'm being honest.

• 22:54David Hoffman?

  The tweets always come.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually funny. Most of my meditations these days, I'll have one kind of core topic that's like in my head. And throughout the course of that meditation, I'll have like the crafted words in place that I come out of it and just bang it and just rip it right away. But more generally, I would say, yeah, the goal of it is just to recognize that I'm thinking and recognize that I need to just be centered in my thoughts. And so even if I am having thoughts, whatever they are, it's okay to have those and just make sure it's coming from a point of like relaxation, you know, concentration and sort of like self fulfillment. And from there, I think I'm able to operate at a pretty high level.

• 23:23David Hoffman?

  I want the listeners to notice that Cooper speaks quickly and never really ums or ahs and never pauses to think and is very surgical in what he says. And I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this is a result of that.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  One hundred and ten percent.

• 23:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so when you were a kid, before you were meditating, was, were you not able to speak in this fashion?

• 23:42Speaker 00

  I think I've gotten better at it through practice, you know, doing these podcasts. And writing helped me a lot with that. You know, writing really helped me distill my thoughts into very clear and concise thoughts. And as I've started to go from writing to speaking, I think those two things are directly correlated. But I would say more broadly, you know, my, uh, my meditation has been the focal point for everything that I've done in my career so far. You know, I, I know it's a really small thing to pick up, but I'm a very big fan of this book called Atomic Habits that talks about instilling very, very powerful habits in your life. And even before I read that book, this was five years ago, the fact that I found meditation as a focus for me to do every single day, regardless of where I am in the world. I've traveled so many places in the world. And even if I'm at a hostel with thirty people, I will make sure the very first thing I do after I get a shower in the morning is pop a med. You know, get in there for ten to fifteen minutes.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Get focused. You know, all my friends have traveled with, they're like, all right, you ready to go for that? I'm like, no, no, I gotta, I gotta get my meditation in. It's like a thing. And if I don't have one, you could start to see that I get a tiny bit neurotic. And so I'm like, yeah, I need to, I need to have this every single day in my life.

• 24:39David Hoffman?

  Okay, so every morning after you shower, you one, one med?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yep, one med.

• 24:43David Hoffman?

  And then another one later in the day?

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, later at night. So basically, my call every day looks like waking up, getting a shower, meditating, and then doing cults from about, let's call it nine thirty until six, basically, thirty minutes back to back, maybe a gap in between. Um, as I start to notice that I'm slipping a little bit in my mental focus, I will generally grab a bite to eat, something really, really light, like a smoothie, or an asable, as I'm sure you've seen.

• 25:04David Hoffman?

  Yes, I've seen them all, yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  And then, uh, meditating, getting into deep work. You know, I think that second shift is really important. Cause I think for a lot of us, we tap out around that like five to six hour, and then we just kind of go do something else during the night. But I see that second shift as the time to really like go that extra mile. And so for me, I don't spend it talking to people on back to back calls. That's when I do my deep work. So I do my writing, I do a lot of the project management, I do a lot of governance. I do a lot of things that are digital first, so like being in discord and stuff like that. And I really try and separate my time from active interactions and talks to more like deep work, kind of text based work and anything that is on the computer.

• 25:39David Hoffman?

  When did you get into crypto?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Twenty seventeen.

• 25:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And, and you were in college at the time, right?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was going through my senior of college. One of my professors had a class about future of music, and he started talking about something called smart contracts. And at this point, I don't know why the hell this was in the itinerary. I don't know why he was talking about it. But he was like, yeah, there's this cool stuff. Um, for the listeners that don't know, music royalty system is very long right now. If I play a track on Spotify today, you're gonna see a third of a penny in six months from now. And so when he talked to me about this technology where you got paid in real time, directly to the artist with no middleman in the middle, it made a lot of sense to me. You know, I had been exposed to Bitcoin earlier on from like different stuff on the internet, we'll say. And, um, you know, this was the way for me to advance that thinking to something more practical. And so as I started to look into this thing of crypto, I saw new shiny object to curate, same way that I saw Pokemon cards, same way that I saw music. I was like,

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Crypto, here's a new sector and not a lot of people are talking about it. There's a lot of opportunity and a lot of different information to shuffle through. And when I see that as a surface area, I get really excited about it. And so I started from a lens of like music got me curious about this, but very quickly I was reading every white paper that there was for every project. I was on ICO drops every single day and just fully in the mix. And it was a game, it was a culture and I think online you could find that people were just really excited about finding the next hot project. And I think the thing that really clicked for me is unlike RuneScape or unlike, you know, music where there was social capital associated with it, there was real financial value to be earned here. And so that curation could go a level above where you could actually make real value and real money out of the curation that you did. And I think that's why I just ended up diving in so fast, becoming so consumed with it so quickly.

• 27:09David Hoffman?

  So after you realize that there's something here with crypto, a lot of people come into crypto and they're like, oh, I can make a bunch of money. Some people move on from that and then they think about other things, but most people start there. Is that where you were, you were at the very like genesis of your crypto career, like, oh, I can get my like my block portfolio number really, really high?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I was graduating college, I had a music business degree. That degree was setting me up to go into tour marketing or something that felt very, you know, maniacal. Like I was basically just a human putting things in a spreadsheet and I never was excited by that. I was doing some artist management on the side, but it wasn't really paying a lot of money. And so I was picking up a lot of odd jobs on the side. I was doing Uber driving for a long time. I would drive Friday and Saturday night, nine to 12, nine to 2 AM. Cause those were the best times to drive. You would have high surge rates and I could make a lot of money. I was picking up a delivery driving, um, hot hours. So instead of that being like, you know, just DoorDash during the day, there was an app that allowed you to go work at different restaurants for one to two hour intervals for 15 an hours plus tip. And so I was making like $50, then I would hop on Uber and I kind of had a goal at some point just to make like a hundred dollars a day.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  So like if I can make a hundred dollars a day that I can make this much a year and then I'll be, you know, set off. And when I came out of college, I was like, okay, I'm making a hundred dollars a day. This is great, but like, what am I doing? There's no upside here. Like I'm just kind of driving and like, what is the end goal of this work that I'm doing? And there was no ladder to climb really. So when I saw crypto, I saw two things. I saw one, a way for me to just get the number of my bank account up. First and foremost, it was the best way for me to make money and be practical with my time. And two, there was an infinite design space. I was like, I don't know what this is going to net out at, but I am 100% confident that spending my time in crypto over delivery driving is going to net out in a better result.

• 28:43David Hoffman?

  Do you have a 2017 like token that you just like have a place in your heart for?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Lots of them, yeah. Lots of ICOs, lots of the Neo ICOs I did really good on.

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  Neo ICOs, wow. That's funny.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was doing a lot of the Asian exchanges and just like kinda going about in these weird directions. Trying to think, like, there was one called like Red Pulse. I just remember there was like a peak point in 2017 where there was like three days in a row where I just had huge bags of the top gainers on coin market cap like consistently for four days and I was like, I'm gonna go, you know, this game over.

• 29:14David Hoffman?

  What month of 2017 did you get in?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Um, I wanna say like June 2017.

• 29:20David Hoffman?

  Okay, we got in at the same time, that's pretty funny. Uh, was there, was it crypto that really resonated with you? Or was it one specific part about crypto? Was it like, for me, for me, I got pulled into Ethereum like pretty damn quick.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:32David Hoffman?

  Uh, was there any sort of like thesis or theory or just culture about crypto that you're like, oh yeah, this is my tribe? Or this is what I believe, I resonate with that?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  I didn't find Ethereum really until 2018. I was using it to do ICOs, but it actually was something that I came into pretty late. Cause I was doing Bitcoin first and I was on Bitrex and then I started doing ICOs and when I started doing ICOs, you need to have MetaMask with Ether. But I remember for the longest time, I was like, I understand why people would want Ether, but it's just used to buy things, other coins. I was like, I don't really get this. And um, we're in 2018, but I do remember very vividly doing ICO culture. I love the Telegram chats. I don't know if anyone remembers like ICO days of Telegram chats. My favorite thing ever would be when an ICO would drop and it would be like one of the most popular ones. And so the Telegram chat, like the thing would break and then it was just full on, like the most insane messages you've ever seen, like thousands and thousands for a second. You couldn't mute it. So there's all this profane stuff in there. It was really messed up.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  And it was like, just that idea of there being such a concentration of power and energy on the internet and one specific chat was like so exciting to me. I was like, there is such a community here around this idea of just making money on the internet. And even if these projects are complete dogshit, which most of them were, the fact that all of us are just mobilizing to different like little pockets of the internet consistently was the funnest thing in the world to me.

• 30:43David Hoffman?

  Did you, how did that, did you start like changing what you wanted your career to be? Like, how did you know that like, oh yeah, I wanna do this crypto thing professionally for my, for my job? Or at the time, was it more just like, oh yeah, these are fun tokens and fun means?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  I think when the run up happened in 2017, I saw my net worth skyrocket from what it was at that time. I was really excited about that fact and I was like, okay, there's clearly a financial opportunity to be played here. I saw that there was a lot of room to grow, you know, things were very immature and there was a lot of just BS out there. And I loved that I could be independent and autonomous, you know, I graduated college, I was doing trading ICOs. Eventually I got good at trading them and so I was like, okay, what does it look like to do an ICO? So I went on Angel List, found a bunch of random projects that had some conceptual vision of doing an ICO. Was able to convince them to either give me tokens or give them like $5,000 cash or just like some really, really marginal amount just to be involved in some way, shape or form. And through that process, I went from being like speculator to really an early contributor. You know, what that looked like was me just writing a bunch of white papers, me writing a bunch of blog posts.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  I would tell these projects, here are the listing sites you want to be on, here are the good ICO sites to be on. You know, here are the people on Twitter that matter and just sort of like getting the lay of the land. And for me, coming out of college, you know, these CEOs, if you can even call them that, these older individuals were just so fascinated by like me thinking that I had this like knowledge of how the space worked. That just gave me an opportunity to just be present. And I think the reason I'm most successful for that, and I'll caveat that not a single project raised a single dollar. None of them raised their, or launched their token ever. I worked through exposure, basically the whole time and I probably earned $5,000 cash over the course of like six months. But they flew me to Southeast Asia to go to crypto conferences. So I went to ConsenSys Singapore, I went to Beyond Blocks in Thailand, I went to Pundix in Bali, you know, most random conferences in the world and I just started getting in the mix.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  I was like, what does it look like to be around these people? Clearly I'm, you know, really involved in this, but am I, am I crazy? Am I operating on an island or like, am I kind of in the right direction? I think as I started going to more of those conferences, I stumbled upon this thing called ETH Global, you know, and DevCon and sort of like these Ethereum conferences. And I remember when I started to go to those, then I was like, oh wait, this is way different from ConsenSys. This is way different from like these booth stand conferences where there's some ICO project with like a person at the front. Ended up changing from me just kind of walking around to booths and being like, hey, I saw that update you have, like good job. To me being like, but you guys like are doing this full time too, like, I'm not like crazy. Cause I'm like this kid out of college, just like randomly like doing crypto full time, like you guys care about this? And like, this was when ETH was coming back down and so it started the bear market and uh,

• 33:09Speaker 00

  you just started to see like real people, you know, it was like, sure, we all are knowledgeable about the space. And we probably made some money in 2017, but we're here for something bigger. And I think that was when things started to change from it being fully speculative to at least being very intentional and me starting to actually find a family in the space.

• 33:24David Hoffman?

  How did you make it to the bear market?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Traveling Southeast Asia, you know, I'm fortunate enough, I graduated college, I moved back home for a bit, and then immediately just started traveling. And so me and my good friend Lucas Campbell, who I work with daily, went Southeast Asia for three months. We went to all these conferences, just sort of putzed around. We were doing like odd consulting jobs for projects, like writing white papers and just giving them like blog posts and stuff like that. And you know, it was fun. I had friends around me. We were kind of in it together at that point. And it was just good having a couple of people in my orbit who were kind of in the mix with me, because even though we weren't doing good by any means, we knew that we were doing something together. And I think that vision that there was going to be a brighter future, that there were going to be things like Maker and Uniswap that started popping up. We were like, okay, we might be insane. We lost all of our money. Our parents don't know what the hell we're doing. They think that we're crazy, but at least we had the freedom to just

• 34:12Speaker 00

  try it, you know, fresh out of college, not a lot of, not a lot to lose, you know? As we stuck through it, I think we started to notice there was real stuff there. And as DeFi started coming to the picture, I think that was when things started to really get formalized into being like, we're not crazy. There's real stuff here. You know, this is a topic to cover. This is something that, again, back to my point of curation, this is the next thing. This is the thing to really start covering very, very deeply.

• 34:32David Hoffman?

  Was Callum and James involved at this point?

• 34:34Speaker 00

  No, they weren't. That was actually a year and a half later. And so me and Lucas were working closely. We were doing consulting for a bunch of projects. We started writing for a bunch of DeFi blogs, so one called DeFi Rate. Started contributing to places like Bankless and The Defiant, and just really started writing about everything that there was to do with DeFi. You know, at that point, I remember I was cranking out like three to five articles a day. It was like fundraising announcement, token launch, you know, new update from the DEX or something like that, and just like really getting as much of a lay-in as possible. And I really prided myself on on Twitter. The second that something was tweeted from a project, I could write up an article in literally 10 minutes, 500 words, get it posted on the site and just have it out there. Rip a tweet. And that like consistency to just go from this happened to Cooper covered it, just like merge that as close together as possible. And then I think over time, I kind of

• 35:17Speaker 00

  started to gain a following in the space as someone who's very knowledgeable about everything that was happening.

• 35:21David Hoffman?

  So I think that where you started writing and tweeting, I think that is the start of your, the rest of your trajectory. Like everyone plays around with tokens. Everyone thinks they can do the ICO of DeFi, from all the way you can call them, DeFi token. Back then, like everyone played tokens in 2017 and then we all kind of like, you know, sobered up in 2018. It sounded like that that was the moment where like Cooper's crypto story really began, right?

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:46David Hoffman?

  That actually started is at the beginning of the story that actually has coherence to where you are now. Is that a fair take?

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Totally fair. And I would say one interesting point to add on is when I was in college and getting deep in the music scene, I was actually doing music journalism. And so I was doing artist interviews. I was traveling to festivals. I was meeting different acts and covering different shows. And that early writing practice I had in college ended up being extremely beneficial for this DeFi era because I was already a somewhat decent writer at that point. You know, it wasn't like I was coming at it from scratch. Like I had been writing for three to five years. I was doing white papers, as we mentioned. And so when I started going to like a news reporting and an editor's standpoint where I was delegating articles to people. I had a basic conception for how media worked and I think that that trajectory of being able to take a topic and breaking it down into here's what it is. Here's why it matters and here's what you do to act upon that. Like that three-part process, like really refining that allowed me to just get very practical about my writing and really allowed me to start building a brand for myself.

• 36:36David Hoffman?

  How'd you make it through the bear market financially?

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Uh, through writing.

• 36:39David Hoffman?

  Writing?

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm really thankful. There was an angel out of Silicon Valley who started DeFi Rate and he was paying me, you know, a dollar per word basis to basically just pump out articles. And then I was just churning out three to five a week. And so I was earning maybe 500 to a thousand dollars a week just from writing. Immediately putting all of that into ETH, picking up some odd jobs here and there, writing white papers, doing like small consulting gigs, which is basically just project management. And through that, you know, just survived. I don't think I was like selling, but it was enough for me to be comfortable. At that time, I was living at home with my parents and so I didn't have any expenses. And that kind of rolled into DeFi summer. And I think that was the time that really ended up being like the big change for me. I started going like, it was like, I remember I went to DevCon. I started meeting some people that were like, met James there and started doing some like the FireEye stuff.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  That's where that was born. Had joined Metacartel at that time. And so I was very deep on the ground on the Dow front. And quarantine, when that hit and COVID was the best thing that ever happened to me.

• 37:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  And I feel really fortunate to say that because I know for a lot of people it was really bad. But for me, being able to be at home with my parents, lock myself in my room, work 14 hours a day and then go to the basement and work out and wake up and do it all over again. That was the biggest grind period of my life. And that's when I saw the most success. Because I was working harder than anyone else around me and I knew that for a fact and it really drove me to just keep going harder and harder.

• 37:51David Hoffman?

  So what was the first thing that was beyond writing? That was like, that was next in your story of just like actual writing and being part of just crypto? Like after writing, where'd you graduate into?

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Governance.

• 38:02David Hoffman?

  Governance.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was on Discord forums, I was in Discord chats, I was doing work with teams. So like I remember I was very involved with AVE's V2 launch, I was working a lot with the Balancer team at the time. Started to just kind of work for like more legit, legit projects. You know, 2017, I was working for just anyone who would hire me. As DeFi Summer started to happen, as I started to gain a little bit of following on Twitter and had like outlets like DeFiRite to offer, I could start working with more high caliber teams. And I think that period of time, I was starting to give value-added insights to very important projects in the space. And starting to gain social capital by doing governance proposals. It went from me just being someone around to me actually playing a core role in the things that were making meaningful influence in the space.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  So the way I got through bear markets was by working for companies. I worked from one company which blew up to another company which blew up to another company which blew up.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51David Hoffman?

  It kept on going down the line until, until DeFi Summer and then I was like, okay, I made it to the other side.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:56David Hoffman?

  You didn't, you never had the safety of a company. You, you were on your own. Was that, was that scary? Was that stressful? Like, what was it like to be a lone wolf while, you know, in 2018 and 19 and the beginning of 2020, it felt like just ashes was coming from the sky because the crypto market was burning over and over and over again?

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it gave me a lot of freedom. I think that it takes a very specific type of person to be comfortable in that regard. I'm very thankful for my parents for just supporting me in that. You know, they knew about the products I was working on, they kind of knew about the life I was living. They knew that I was traveling a lot, they knew that I was living at home and so I had a nice pillow. You know, I had a nice cushion where I could never really fall too far down. So even though I was a lone wolf and I didn't feel like I was like gonna be on the street or anything like that. You know, I was very thankful and fortunate for that position. And I think as I started to see a little bit of success through working with these projects, I was like, I'm starting to get paid in tokens now. You know, there was a period of time when I remember it was like I would just take any amount of payment to get by. Like I said with writing, I was getting dollar per word. So I'd get D I sometimes I'd get U S D and then I would choose to buy ether, I'd choose to buy this. But as I started to do governance, it was like, I'm gonna get paid in A V tokens.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Or lend at the time, I'm gonna get paid in balancer tokens. So as I started to earn governance tokens, I was like, okay, not only can I make money from writing, from doing freelance stuff, I can now parlay that to start getting paid in ownership. And I think that transition allowed me to start carving out a stake that felt really meaningful. And so as I started to play more of these speculation games, so through DeFi summer, we all know about the tokens that launched, we all know about liquidity mining, we all know about yield farming. And I just got really good about being practical in those situations. So I'd be the first one in the farms, I'd be the first one trading the tokens, like Uma I C I was like, there on Uniswap, the data to happen and stuff like that, you know? And through those experiences, it felt like 2017, what happened, but more legit and more formal. And now instead of me playing a follow on to like,

• 40:38Speaker 00

  you know, pump on Binance, that's up a ton. It was like, oh, you're day one, you know? And I think that's when we started to see these real big wins in crypto, because not only was ETH acting as a vehicle for that, but there was sort of this underbelly underneath it where you could really go deeper on those relationships. And I think that freedom to be agile across everything, rather than being like specifically focused on one coin in particular, was something that I really, really loved.

• 40:59David Hoffman?

  So if anyone that who knows you now, they look at you like, oh yeah, of course Cooper would never work for a company. Was, when you graduated college, would you have been able to predict that?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah? What about if you is not gonna work at a company?

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Just like

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  Cooper not gonna make it, why?

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think creative freedom and control, you know, I think I have a lot of respect for talented CEOs and I've had a lot of, I've learned so much by working deeply across a number of projects, which we'll talk about shortly here. But I think for me, you know, my skill set is knowing everyone and knowing everything about every project. And if you try and put me into a box and say that I can only work on this parameter of work, it's never gonna work for me because my skill set is being everywhere. You know, it's not being focused on one thing, it's being across everything. And I think by nature, a company is Uh directing you to be focused on one thing very deeply and I think me being across everything is where I've been able to shine in my life thus far.

• 41:51David Hoffman?

  When did that strategy become um uh defined in your head like when you say like oh I I am like I'm gonna be the guy that knows everyone was that uh first subconscious and then you realized it and now it's defined or were you like oh no I want to be the guy that knows everyone and then you started doing it like what happened first?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  I think subconscious thing it just kinda happened you know in the same way that I said I started picking up projects in 2017 I remember I was juggling like five clients at the time five just like ICO projects and I was bouncing around to all of them then on top of that I was still trading and I was like on Twitter and stuff I was like I'm actually pretty good at like you know multitasking and project management I started to be really direct about like this time of the week is for this project this time of the week is for this project and started building on my own internal calendar and through that I sort of developed like my own routine and schedule that felt very good to me you know albeit very chaotic to everyone else but I just had a system for myself that worked well and everything else just fell into place.

• 42:43David Hoffman?

  When did you have the aha moment about owning being paid in ownership?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  It's a great question it was it was the writing stuff honestly it was like getting paid in dye into my MetaMask wallet and then using that to buy ETH on on Uniswap and doing that consistently over time and then just doing like shitcoin corner with my friends and so every call we would start and we're doing governance or something like that we'd spend the first 15 minutes being like this token's going up why is it going up why is it cool uh Lucas and I were writing something called token Tuesdays at the time so we were covering different coins and projects new DeFi protocols I mean like here's a you know DCF of some maker protocol or something like that and it was it was still buying but I remember even before I was earning these tokens I remember when I was buying these tokens I was like it's not only about you know them going up in like a speculative sense and like them pumping like you were buying you were buying ownership you know

• 43:32Speaker 00

  like we were using this to participate in governance we are governance forums I remember that we got delegated a lot of comp when comp launched and now it's me and Lucas was like the best thing ever like we got 10,000 comp delegated to us from Lesh and we're like let's go like we're in the mix you know we have governance power now like we wrote this whole post about why we're a big delegate and why it mattered and whatnot and I was like there is such a difference between just like moon boy Twitter who's like plotting out charts with like lines and stuff and then just like on the governance forum like actually participating meaningful discussions and even before we were earning any governance tokens for doing that that sense of purpose and feeling like you're one with the community was just really really powerful to me.

• 44:07David Hoffman?

  About the Moon Boy chart people, do you feel like those are your like your opposites? Because you have the people that look at the charts and be like, oh, like if I go, if I do this, I can maximize the profit that way. And then you're like, well, if I grind here, I can maximize that way. Do you feel like these are just opposite ends of the spectrum?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that um, I try and see everyone's viewpoint very clearly. And so I understand this archetype of a trader. And I understand that people find a lot of value and you know, purpose that being corrected in trading. I think it's something where I trade more on vibes than I do on like, you know, specifics, I guess. And so for me, it was always just a very weird point of reference to spend your time on. I've always found that like traders, you're just permanently a speculator. You know, I don't think that traders ever turn into contributors. And I think my biggest learning in the space was the more that you become a contributor, the more success you're going to have. So I wouldn't say that they're my opposite so much as I am that they are stuck in a phase that I think has a limited upside, even if you're financially rich. I think that there is lacking a big opportunity for you to be a meaningful contributor, something that matters.

• 45:10David Hoffman?

  And then also missing out on the connections.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:13David Hoffman?

  I mean, I guess traders get connected to other traders, but contributors get connected to everyone else.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And you're seeing a lot of traders now become really involved in NFTs. Because I think they like that sense of connection that comes with NFTs that you didn't really see with fungible tokens.

• 45:27David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's a good take. I like that. How did Fire start?

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Started through DevCon. Yeah, I met James very briefly there and then we went to SF and then Alex Majmaz had a Metacartel meetup. It was like audios, James was speaking from Axialabs, um, Ave guys were speaking, Dow House guys were speaking on Pokémon. And I went to this like little SF meetup and I remember they were just like, hey, we're talking about like consumer facing applications. We're talking about how does crypto go mainstream? We're talking about culture and all this stuff. And I was like, wow, this is fascinating. Me and James sat down for lunch and then uh, that was kind of like this conference circle that happened. So it was DevCon to San Francisco, to ETH Denver, to ETH London, to ECC, all in the course of about a month and a half. And uh, James was on that circuit too. And so me and him just got really close at that time. We sat down with a project in London.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  And started talking about doing a project together. Lucas and I were doing like consulting over here. James and Cal were doing consulting over here. Um, Lucas and I were building this brand around DeFi with the writing that we were doing. James and Cal have been working for a lot of legit projects in that time. And so we were kind of able to merge, like bring in the skillsets that Lucas and I had on the writing side with sort of legitimacy that James and Cal brought. And just started leveling up our community interactions, consulting, whatever you want to call it, to what, you know, then became FireEye.

• 46:42David Hoffman?

  Is FireEye the thing that you feel like the most responsible for? Because you were for so many different things in so many different directions. It's hard to like, when I, when I wake up, I think, oh, it's bankless time because that's all I got. Uh, is that, is it like, when you wake up like, oh, FireEye first? Or is it just like one of the many projects that you work on?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  I give FireEye full credit to James. You know, I see that as kind of his, his child and his baby. And I think that he came from a spot of really legitimizing that vehicle. You know, like coming out of Metacartel, um, me and him had done this thing called Metaclan very briefly at the time, which was like an esports down. So we were just like starting random dolls and random projects. And I think that he was very much intentional in saying like, I know you guys did consulting before, but like you need to step your shit up. You know, he's like, you need to stop getting paid like a thousand dollars in tokens. He's like, if we're going to work for these projects, we're doing 20K, 30K engagements. And I remember at the time, I was, I'm so notoriously bad at underpricing myself, like my whole crypto career is be like, I'll write your white paper for like 500 bucks. And then like, you know, some people be like, what are you doing, man? You're fucking the market. It's like, white papers are 10 grand, all right? You can't be coming out here writing for 500 bucks. I'm like, but why not?

• 47:45Speaker 00

  I can write them in two hours. Like, sure, I'm gonna, it's like 250,000 hours. Like, no, it's not about the time you put in, it's about like the value of the output. And I think those early projects with James, he was like going in very forcefully with these clients and be like, no, our rates are like this much. Like, oh, but how is only four of you guys here at a college? It's like, I don't give a damn about like what we look like or who we are. Like, we have so much context and value to bring to you that's like, you're in or you're not, you know? And I think that that growth process ended up becoming a very valuable skill for me as I started to do more in the space. Cause it learned to teach me to just overprice yourself and overvalue yourself and start to get paid in what you earn. And so I guess to answer your question directly, I think that I was an extremely valuable member of FireEye and still am today. But I would say that the inception of it was definitely due to James and I still give him full credit for that.

• 48:27David Hoffman?

  With Cooper thus far in the second half of the show, we get into the more recent timeline of Cooper's story, moving to LA, the getting the celebrities into crypto, all of that good stuff and what it's just like to know a little bit about everyone in this space because everyone seems to know Cooper. So we'll go ahead and get right into that second half of the show, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. The Gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and metaverse tokens like Yify and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the

• 49:12David Hoffman?

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• 49:54David Hoffman?

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• 50:38David Hoffman?

  But there's a weak point in Web3: your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser. No extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/banklist and click the Wallet icon to get started. At some point in time, you started to get into the world of, outside of crypto, but people that were like, you know, the Hollywood types, the celebrity types coming into crypto. And all of a sudden, it seems, from my perspective, that when they did that, Cooper was there.

• 51:22David Hoffman?

  How'd that happen?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  I moved to LA in the middle of quarantine, in September. I started talking to a project called Audius, which is a music streaming app. Obviously, as you've heard in this conversation, music played a big role in my life. And so, Roonial reached out to me and he's like, "Hey, we're thinking about doing a token soon. Do you guys want to help?" Roonial's in Metacartel Ventures, and so we had just kind of seen our work that we were doing. And I was like, "Hey, not only do I want to do this token, but I want to be really involved in this project, more so than any of the ones I had been in the past." And so, it actually ended up being the most formal relationship with the team I've had thus far. I signed a contract to start working 30 hours a week. I was in the Slack channels, I was doing all-hands meetings. And my entire objective was crypto and Web3 for like a consumer-facing platform, basically. And so, we launched that token, we started doing a lot of NFT features. And long story short, through that process of working at Audius,

• 52:09Speaker 00

  I was like, "I need to be somewhere that's more culturally relevant than Philadelphia, where I was at the time." I was doing traveling, going to these conferences, but I always come back to Philly, would come back to homebase, back to my parents. And I was like, "This isn't going to cut it. You know, if I want to really go to the next level and I want to make crypto cool again, I need to be somewhere where this is going to be meaningful." And so, just up on a whim, got a one-way flight to LA, stayed with a friend for a week, and then signed a lease. Ended up flying back, uh, driving across country with my brother and my two cats in my car. Forty-eight hours after signing the lease, my parents like, you can't go to LA. What do you mean you're gonna go on Saturday? It's Thursday. Like, you're not gonna go to LA. And I was like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do it. Packed up my whole room, put everything in the car and just sent it out there. Had no idea directly what I was doing, but I was like, LA feels like the best spot for me to develop a community for myself around music and crypto. And so we're just gonna wing it. And I think the rest is history from there.

• 52:54David Hoffman?

  Have you ever spent any time in LA or California at all before that?

• 52:58Speaker 00

  No.

• 52:59David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:00David Hoffman?

  You were just like, LA, that's where Hollywood is. Like, yeah, that's probably, probably the right spot.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz through the SoundCloud era, I saw that all of the artists that I had followed were spending more and more time out there. Like, that was just the area where if you're in music, and you're in electronic music specifically, you eventually moved to LA if you made it, or if you were someone relevant. And so I just saw, like, through this whatever glass, I was like, alright, if I'm gonna make it, and whatever I'm doing, I need to be in LA. It's just the spot to be.

• 53:22David Hoffman?

  So, back, backing up a little bit, uh, people that know Cooper and meet you in real life, uh, you have a funny, uh, not funny, uh, what's the right word? Uh, distinct sense of fashion.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  Did that come when you moved to LA, or were you also, did you have that, that kind of fashion style also in high school? Like, when did that happen?

• 53:39Speaker 00

  I had never bought a piece of designer clothing prior to LA.

• 53:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah?

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually prior to, four months ago.

• 53:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, four months ago. So this is new as of four months ago?

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, four to six at this point, but definitely very, very recent.

• 53:50David Hoffman?

  So, what, what resonated you, uh, you with that?

• 53:54Speaker 00

  I think in crypto is this really funny, uh, and I love it by the way, but just like in crypto, everyone is rich, but no one wears anything but like a t-shirt. You know, and just like shorts, and it's like, I have a ton of money, but I'm never gonna show anything. But for me, I was like, well, what if, what if I showed that I'm doing well for myself? You know, what if I like bought clothes that represented the success I've had and sort of like the vibe that I represent and really go from being like, you know, wealthy on the internet to like showing that a little bit more in person? And something that influenced a lot of this for me is there's a great book called hashing Twitter. It's about the history and origin of Twitter. And there was a distinct chapter where they talked about Jack when he left Twitter the first time to go start Square. They said the biggest thing that changed for him is he started to wear Dior clothing. He started to buy a lot more shirts, and he would come to the office looking really fresh. And in that book, they depicted that his employees started taking him a lot more seriously, by the way, that he dressed.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  And when I started hearing that, I was like, what is this brand called Dior? I've never heard of this in my life. And everyone who knows I was listening now knows that I fucking love Dior. It's my favorite brand. But that was the inception. So I went online and I saw this cool shirt. I got it ordered and I was like, $600 for a T-shirt? Like, what the hell? Like, this is insane. Like, why would I ever spend this? And then I wore it like once or twice. People started commenting on it. I remember then someone was like, wait, you bought it online? You gotta go to the store. Started to develop a relationship with the brand manager there and she's fantastic to me. She invites me to all these private events and uh, Saw this new world, you know, keeps coming back to this. New industry, new shiny object. That's really exciting to me. Fashion as a design space is incredibly interesting. You know, the caliber, the people that you meet there, the relationships with the representatives at the store, The different designers and creative directors.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  I'm starting to see this map of like the way that that world is starting to operate. And I think that combined with like Web 3 and what's happening now around digital identity. I think there's a very interesting intersection where not only are you proficient in tech, But you can also show that you're up to date with like mainstream culture. And I think that intersection is something that I want to be very, very skilled in well versed in.

• 55:40David Hoffman?

  So this is you just applying your ability to multitask, Be personable, know a lot of people, and then now you're coming into LA and there's this again, and what you're saying, a new shiny object. And you're just like, well, let me just like copy and paste that strategy into this new thing that I now care about.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fortunately, with a backing that allowed me to be present in that conversation, you know, I don't think if it weren't for crypto and sort of the The gains that I'd seen there, I'd be able to participate in fashion nearly to the level that I have now. But now that I am at a point where I've developed a brand for myself on the internet, I'm in LA. I'm seen as someone that's at the intersection of culture and crypto. Me being able to represent myself physically with that feels very on-brand for me. And I've had a lot of fun out of being that guy that goes to a crypto conference when everyone else is wearing a T-shirt And wearing a chain and wearing Dior and wearing like a fucking nice watch and just being like happy about that. Be like, you know what, guys? It's bull market. We all know it. It's all mania. It's definitely gonna crash and this is definitely coming back this year, but for the time being, We're gonna enjoy this and we're gonna have a great time with it.

• 56:37David Hoffman?

  One of my friends who has been around for two cycles, I've only been around for one cycle and you and I are just are one cyclists. He is a big fan of buying nice stuff during the bull market.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:47David Hoffman?

  Because, I mean, you're not gonna do it then, like you might not be able to ever do it, right? So you've got to grab the bull by the horns. You gotta, you gotta caught yourself up during bull market.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think there's a

• 57:00Speaker 00

  I'm starting to recognize that there does need to be a rebalancing of sort of the way that we're living our lives in the bull market relative to how we're gonna live it more long-term. You know, I think in the last couple of months, I've been spending a lot more than I normally have. I've been developing habits that I don't think are very sustainable and I need to correct that. And so being able to see that around the corner is very important. And so I very much enjoy going out and having shopping sprees and honestly, the reason why I've loved it the most, I've been developing connections with very competent people around fashion. And so artists and DJs that I know in LA, people who are very successful in their career, young kids who are 20 to 25 but have gotten a million dollar advance from a record label. They really have a lot of peers that they can just go like enjoy stuff with. So me being able to be like, let's go to Rodeo and drop 10 bands on some clothes, you know, and just like having that be like a vibe that we connect around.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  It builds such legitimacy in a way that I've never seen before that it's something I very much appreciate. But to that same T, it can become dangerous if you don't understand what you're doing in that regard. And so I've definitely been overspending and doing a lot of stuff there, but I want to make a very clear distinction that it's not sustainable. And it's not something that I should think I'm gonna be able to do forever because it's very unhealthy to have that type of mindset. So I will say while I've been going very ham in recent months, I do want to put this as a public statement to myself to chill out a little bit. Because I think we're all getting a little bit too controlled with the bull market and it is definitely not something that's gonna last forever.

• 58:14David Hoffman?

  Well, coming from people that came out of 2018 and 2019 definitely had like, people that stuck around, they kind of knew that this was coming. It's like, oh, there will be this time in my future where like I get to like, you know, cash in on all the suffering that I have in 2018 and 2019. So like, it's very much a reaction of going through the bear market. But the bull market's been around for almost like coming up on two years now, right? So like it is, it is like, I do resonate with that. It is time to like, oh yeah, let's chill for a little bit.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  I remember $400 ETH thinking that was insane.

• 58:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  We had that runoff going to ETH Denver and it was like $3.50 ETH. I was like, bull market, baby. Let's go. Like DeFi coins are all off like 10x at that point, you know, the portfolio is looking pretty good. And you're like, you're like, yeah, this crypto thing, man. Like, let's go. We're gonna, we're gonna make it. We're gonna make it. Spike down to 80, drops, like completely crashed. I remember being, I remember being working on my basement when that happened and just laughing. Or just like, are you kidding me?

• 59:08David Hoffman?

  We almost had it.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, how is this still possible? I was like, I thought we were over this, like minus 45%.

• 59:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  And I was just like, how is this possible? Yeah, it was a good shell shock. I know that some of my friends got shaken out there. I remember a lot of my friends were on leverage and uh an interesting point for for listeners, I never trade on leverage. I only trade on spot with everything. If I want to be on leverage, I will earn larger ownership stakes in something, but I don't trade on like FTX, I don't trade on DODX, I don't do anything that's like crazy leverage. I just am in spot in all the positions I'm in and I really want to work for everything that I own.

• 59:40David Hoffman?

  Do you like uh borrow stables to farm with? You like lock up any money in compound or AVE or you just completely stay away from collateralized to any of your capital?

• 59:48Speaker 00

  I have like a very small loan on a, I want to say AVE right now, like maybe like, or I have a Maker Vault that I have like some ETH and maybe like 50K in DAI and then I have some stuff on AVE. I have a lot of USDC and Ribbon Finance actually. And so I farm with a good amount of stables, but typically those stables are the result of me taking profits and not actually taking collateral against something.

• 1:00:08David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the way the way that you have upside exposure is by finding projects early-ish and then just grinding?

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would say the best thing that I've learned from Bankless and I'll give you guys a lot of credit for is teaching people how to be responsible with their DeFi risk management. So it's not about going and doing a 10x long on something, understanding that you can put collateral in AVE and you know properly manage that and then do stuff like the ETH ETH fly like liquidity farming thing, you know, where it's like you have, you're on leverage, but you're like earning fees and like the permanent losses less, like those tactics that are like, you can be risky in DeFi but not be like full on DGEN, like that sweet spot I think is really valuable for people that are actually experiencing crypto.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, surgical risk.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, getting back into the the LA conversation, you you started an audience, which is perfect LA material, I'd say. Is that kind of where you started to to meet a lot of people that are external to crypto?

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  110%.

• 1:01:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  My friend Grady that's here at the conference now, actually, he um I connected with him on Instagram because I'd been following his music for a long time. He was like, hey, I'm starting to look in crypto. Does anyone here know what's what's going on? And I messaged him and I was like, I will know more than anyone that you message. He was like, he was like, you actually know crypto? And I was like, yeah, top, top point of one percent. And I said something just like really like verbose about that and it got his attention. So he invited me over to his house. We had a conversation, immediately hit it off. And then from there, that was when things started to change for me in L.A. At that point, I'd been there for three months. It was middle of pandemic and so I was still on my grind. It was like 10 hours a day. I would not leave my apartment more than one day a week and just like fully inside. When I started hanging out with that crew, it went from like me being online in L.A. To me being like physical in L.A. Like there was cool people coming over to their garden house. They were doing album listening parties.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  They were dancing and like it felt like seventies vibe. People were taking mushrooms and just vibing. And I was like, this feels, this reminds me of Colorado again. This reminds me like creative culture, but it's coming from a point of very talented creators. You know, I'd say Colorado was creatively inspiring to me, but it was from people that were just a fan of culture. And then I started to go to L.A. where people were creating culture. You know, they're putting out albums, they're putting out movies, they're photographers, they were shooting for Halsey and Ian Dior and stuff like that. And I was like, wow, like this is the pinnacle of it. I was like, this is not only a way for me to like enjoy the culture, but actually be a part of it. The thing is, I started to get deeper in those circles. I started to bring a lot of this music context they had. I was like, of course I know your music. I'm listening to it for 10 years. You know, I curated it back and stuff. And people were like, wait, really? Like you actually know my stuff from that long ago?

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  And having that additional context with this new angle of crypto like layered on top allowed me to just have such this like interesting skill set. Whereas like I was relevant in the conversations because I knew what was happening. But then I had something of value to add to every single person that I met, which was such a rare thing in L.A. because it's very much the opposite. Most people are always on like this social climb type game where they're like looking to get a favor out of someone. And I was like, I just love your work. And oh, by the way, I can actually amplify that by 10 if you want to give me an hour of your time a week. I think that combination just started to really snowball. And today, I say absolutely love L.A. and I have a lot of unfinished business because I've been happy and lucky enough to build relationships with some of the most influential creators in the world. And I think that we are at the very early pinnacle of what they're going to be able to do in Web 3 over the next couple of years.

• 1:03:11David Hoffman?

  I think that's like pretty emblematic of crypto at large, right? And I remember thinking in 2017, a little bit too early, but besides the point, like, oh, I just hopped on to this. Building that I've hopped onto the roof of this building that's gonna just grow.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:24David Hoffman?

  And once crypto is finally here, I'll just be at the top and all you gotta do is know about crypto. Because people, maybe people think ICOs are weird now, but like something about crypto is gonna be the most mainstream thing possible. I just don't know when. And so as long as you're riding that ride, you just get dropped off at the very top. I'm sure there's a lot of people trying to make it in LA, right? They're trying to just do their grind of like making good music or just doing the normal route. And crypto is just this hack where it's like, well, let's become an expert in crypto and then let's get dropped off at the top.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Literally. Perfect example. And I think the biggest thing I've learned from the past couple of months in LA, this is not gonna be the case forever, but for right now, the amount of time you need to invest in crypto as a creator to have success from like a financial and a social standpoint is very, very small. If you start spending 10 hours a week investing in crypto meaningfully with your time and not your money, being on platforms relative to your career, joining Discord servers relative to your community, joining a DAOs relative to your interest, those three things combined, I have so many friends in LA that have spent not a lot of time, but are now selling, you know, have sold 40 ETH worth of work over the course of like three months. And that's more than they've seen in like years. You know, I have friends who are able to now quit their day jobs because they just are financially sustainable on the back of doing like NFTs and whatnot.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  And I think that was the thing that really motivated and inspired me about this run is 2017. I was trading with music people, but it was just like, here's the ICO, here's the shitcoin to buy. Like it was only a trading group. Now it's very different where it's like, it's not you investing with your time first or with your money first. It's you investing with your time and your creative work and you can now earn to get into crypto rather than having to buy to get into crypto. And I think that difference is why we've seen NFTs become as prominent as they are today because there's this entirely new section of creators that's coming in that doesn't know what Uniswap is. They don't know what DAI is. They don't know what Discord is. But they have this beautiful creative talent and now they can put that on Web3 and start to earn on the back of it. I think that's an incredibly fascinating topic.

• 1:05:14David Hoffman?

  So I don't think anyone listening to this podcast will not think that you are an absolute grinder and deserve all your success. Some people out there in the world, and this is not just for you, but there's a certain cohort of people in the crypto world that spread themselves horizontally.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:30David Hoffman?

  And from the outside in, it kind of, some people are like, well, Cooper's famous because Cooper's famous because Cooper's famous. Like, it's just like, oh, the meme of just like, he's the guy that knows everyone, doesn't actually do anything.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:41David Hoffman?

  But just like, that's just kind of what it's Cooper. Like, that's the brand. What would you say to somebody like that?

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  I would say that it's a very accurate assessment. I love the quote, "He works on everything, works on nothing." I think that's a great quote. My next chapter is showing out how to consolidate my time and focus into investing in myself and parlaying everything I've done thus far into something way bigger. And so I think that my skill sets so far have been very fruitful to me. I think I've done really well at what I've done. I think that's a very acute and accurate challenge, and I look forward to doing what I can to level that up.

• 1:06:08David Hoffman?

  Love it, love it. We haven't talked about this yet, and then the answer reminded me of this. You never say anything poorly about anyone. Why?

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  No point. If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all.

• 1:06:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  I don't have beef with literally anyone, and I want to very much maintain that mentality, because even if you have something that you don't like about me or whatnot, I look forward to trying to change that perspective of you. People are gonna disagree on things. Respect the pump, great mindset to have. Even if you aren't riding the thing that's doing well, I wish you nothing but the best. And I think inviting that positive mentality into your life surrounds you with abundance.

• 1:06:41David Hoffman?

  What about, does that, does that mean that no one out there in the world is deserved of any sort of ire or criticism or, I don't know, negative sentiment?

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  They definitely are, but it's for someone else to criticize and not me. And I've actually found in my life that it is much better to build a positive relationship with someone first than be very direct in feedback with them, because they will listen exponentially more than trying to criticize someone before you have prior context, because most times they won't listen to that. And so if I'm able to come in, and I think this is something that people appreciate with me or what they've told me, is once we are friends, like, I'll be direct with you and be like, "You're fucking up here," or, you know, "You need to fix this," or like, "You need to do this better," or like, "Okay, all these ideas, they kind of suck, but like, what are we doing here? Like, stop thinking about bullshit." And me being able to just be very direct with people that I know and trust has been very helpful for me. And so I always start from a point of, before I try and influence someone, I want to make sure that we are on the same page

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  and I know where you're coming from, what you're working on, so that when I do try and give you advice, it comes from a point of love and respect rather than, you know, me thinking that better than you or me thinking that I have all the answers, which I absolutely do not.

• 1:07:43David Hoffman?

  What about this industry bugs you the most? What would you change to be good?

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  It's a good question.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Probably just like maturity. You know, I think that for a lot of people in the space, we've all done very well for ourselves. And we've not had to really experience a lot of the hardships that other people have had to. And I think us being able to take success and really point that in something meaningful and being respectful about our success, I think is very important. I noticed a lot of people in crypto, when we are enjoying luxuries in life, do not take the proper time to respect the service people around them. And that bothers me a lot. You know, having started from a position of being a delivery driver and sort of working like odd jobs here and there. I remember, you know, the days when I was like stoked for a $5 tip. And I think in crypto, we all have done well for ourselves financially to the point where we forget how hard other people work around us that aren't in crypto. And there's this sort of assumed assumption that everyone should be in crypto. And if you're not, you're just NGMI, which is true to a degree.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  But you need to be respectful of people irregardless of where they are in life. And you need to say thank you, you need to say please, you need to have manners. And even if you're taking a private chat or in a club or something like that, that does not give you any reason to be disrespectful to anyone. And so just like mannerisms and being polite and being respectful of where you are, I think are the biggest things that we can work on as a whole.

• 1:08:59David Hoffman?

  How do you think crypto culture can positively change external culture?

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  I think it can be more inviting to people who don't have the same opportunities that all of us did in 2017 and 2018. You know, I think right now we're in a very growth period of the bull market. I think that giving back is really important. So buying, you know, up and coming creators' works, buying things with no intention of there being a profit in it, donating to get coin grants, doing things like this that feel very positive sum in nature. I think that needs to be a very meaningful part of your investment strategy. Because it's not only about conserving your own wealth. It's about creating wealth for other people. And so as I spend my time now, I think about how do I invest both my time and money into other people so that they can go and expand the vision that we have today? And rather than trying to just one up your own stack, use your own stack to give another people a steak or a playing card to go out and make a meaningful influence.

• 1:09:47David Hoffman?

  Do you have a, have you thought about 2022 goals?

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:09:50David Hoffman?

  Not at all?

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Not yet.

• 1:09:52David Hoffman?

  Is there any, anything on the horizon where you're like, damn, I really want that achieved or done? Or would it be dope if that happened?

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  My 2022 goals are to better formalize what I'm doing. You know, I've operated very much from a Yolo standpoint where it's like I'm earning tokens. I'm doing trades, I'm flipping NFTs, I'm doing well for myself, but it's all very fast paced. I want to set a foundation for myself that feels very strong and very tied in. So as I start to do bigger products in the space, I can feel confident that I'm operating from a point of leverage. Cause at a certain point, and I think everyone in crypto realizes this, when you want to make meaningful change on the world, you need to have a foundation in place that allows you to do that. For a long time, you can operate as lone wolf and as a freelancer and just kind of fuck around and just earn tokens here and there. But when you want to start hiring people, when you start building a team and growing something bigger, you are now responsible for their livelihood, you're responsible for their families, you're responsible for their income.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  In order to do that, you cannot operate from a point of complete freedom because it's going to break down. And so me being able to better realize what those processes look like and set up standards and uh, networks around me to thrive in those environments is something that I'm very excited about for 2022.

• 1:10:53David Hoffman?

  Am I hearing that Cooper is perhaps leaning into the idea of starting his own organization?

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Something to the likes, yeah. I mean, that's, that's the five year plan. I think that we are in the uh, the my, my space area of crypto right now. I think that the Facebook, Instagram and Twitters of Web3 have not been built yet. And it's very much my intention to build one of them.

• 1:11:11David Hoffman?

  Cool. You like uh, like the, the Jack Dorsey founder type?

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably. I think it's going to look very different though. You know, I think what I'm realizing now is like this whole culture around like DAOs and giving ownership early on. We're getting closer and closer to that being at day one. We're doing like airdrops after Series A. Five years from now, I think it's like some version of like a fair launch, like, you know, day one ownership type schema. And I think the founder role will not resemble direct CEO. I kind of see it being more like a uh, it's going to be a big analogy, but like someone like Gandhi, you know, like somebody who's just like one with the people where it's like, you don't have like the biggest ownership stake in the world, but like you have the most social capital. I think that's a position I would love to play where it's like, I can be a leader in whatever I'm building, but it's not by, you know, my net worth or my ownership allocation or something. It's by virtue of the social stake I have in that.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  And there's actually such a large pie around me that everyone else feels so empowered that my empowerment has grown as well.

• 1:12:02David Hoffman?

  So it it sounds like you went from DeFi Summer to conference season. With pretty, pretty quickly. As soon as COVID was over, it's like, oh yeah, conference season. How, how has your life changed from, you know, like you said, being in your apartment six days out of the week? Like in your, in your den, everyone like, everyone was in their, in their industry during DeFi Summers, like in their den. Some people broke out and started doing conference season pretty damn fast and you were definitely one of them. How have you been able to juggle all of your commitments and obligations while being on the road and doing conference stuff? And why do you like conferences so much?

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Just building legitimacy with people. You know, I don't have expectations of getting real work done when I'm on the road. But I think being present in the environments that matter for this industry is how you build trust. And I think that's the thing I value the most about my brand right now. Is if I'm affiliated with a project, I think that you can trust that it is not a scam and you can trust that it has some degree of competency with it. So me being at these conferences and showing that this is my life and I will continue to be on the ground floor of anything that happens, irregardless of how well I do for myself, is very, very important to me. You know, going, you know, ETH Global is expected to have three or four events this year. I will be at every single one of them. You know, I can say that very confidently because I don't want my brand to become big enough to the point where I'm never there. I have this mentality, GA for life. So in concerts, there's general admission, there's VIP and then there's all access. A lot of people, when they start going all access, they'll never go to the crowd.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  They'll never buy a ticket again and they'll just kind of only be all access. And if they don't have the highest level of access, they won't be present. I think it's extremely important for you to remember why you're there in the first place and to be there, you know, on the ground floor. And so for me being in these conferences allows me to just say, I'm here. I'm, I'm one of the people, I want to be with you. I want to shake a million people's hands. And I think that's a big part of my job on the road now is not only just being present to go to the club and party to Chris Lake at 3am in the morning, which is fantastic, it's to be at the conference during the day and shaking the hands of people and being like, what are you working on? How can I help you? I'm never too big for anyone and I will always give someone the time of day.

• 1:13:53David Hoffman?

  If I can get my facts straight, your first ever conference was ETH Denver in 2018?

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah? Looking forward to ETH Denver 2022?

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I got some sport tokens staked on kickback right now. I mentioned a few Buffett corns yesterday. Um, I'm speaking at the Shelling Point Conference that Kevin Owaki is organizing.

• 1:14:10David Hoffman?

  I'll be there with you.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's gonna be a good one.

• 1:14:11David Hoffman?

  ETH Denver's home.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, you went to college in Denver, right? Yeah, it's especially home for you.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember 2018 being fascinated by the fact that there was an Ethereum-specific conference, the idea of tokenomics, and it was me, Lucas, and a couple of their friends, and we were just going completely blind and just being like, whoa, Ethereum, like, super cool, like, yeah, like, what is this crazy space? And so, it's been a long way. ETHemr has always organized a great conference, and I think, generally speaking, I'm starting to see that there's like an opportunity for new type of events in crypto. I think that ETHemr will be fantastic, all ETH global events will be fantastic. One thing that my friend Grady brings up that I think is very important is crypto is cool right now, but it lacks the cultural relevance of it being like hip to like everyday culture. And so, a great example of this is the ratio at these conferences. 90% dudes, 10% girls at best, right?

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  Every single conference, like even like crypto parties that are being thrown as like the cool crypto things to do, same type of thing. You know, like, how do we get to a point where beautiful 23-year-old actress wants to come and hang out with crypto people? And not feel like they're going there because they want to learn about NFTs, but want to be there because they're the coolest people in the room there? I think trying to shape these events and these conferences into a point that those can coexist with sort of ETHemrs of the world, that's the kind of culture that I want to incubate. And to give a quick anecdote, No Filter: History of Instagram, another fantastic book, Kevin Systrom, when he was building Instagram, would do curated dinners with all the most high-value people in the world. People like to think that Instagram just got big out of nowhere, but he was very calculated in onboarding people in a select manner, where he would do a public Instagram meetup, where you could just come and talk about taking pictures.

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  He would do like a pseudo-private one that was like a VIP happy hour, and then he would do curated dinner with 20 high-profile individuals. He would bring you together and really talk about the future of Instagram, roll out a concierge service to make you feel like you were in the mix. And I'm starting to see early examples of that in crypto now. And I think especially with me being in LA over a three-to-five-year horizon, I want to start building a culture where going to a crypto event is not only going to hang out with a bunch of nerds, it's going to be with the most prominent people in technology and culture. And starting to create those pockets, I think, is what's going to take us from today, where it's very much a if-you-know-you-know industry, to this being a meaningful part of everyone's lives, irregardless of how deep you are down the rabbit hole.

• 1:16:20David Hoffman?

  So crypto has a trajectory through space and time going forward. How does Cooper's presence there, how do you want it to be changed by you?

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  I want to be someone that can inspire other people to make meaningful change in their lives. When I think about what I want to do in the world, I want to create technology that allows people to meaningfully impact their lives, irregardless of me spending time with them. My current bottleneck is that I can only be in one place at once. And so I feel very confident if I sit with you and work on a project over a long time horizon, we're going to do something great, but I cannot be there for everyone. And so what I need to do next is build technology that allows me to take the same templates and materials that I'm doing in one-on-one sessions and scaling that out to an infinite number of people. And so over a five-year time horizon, I want to try and export my mentality and sort of ethos into technology that allows other people to carry the same attitude with them.

• 1:17:11David Hoffman?

  Is there any internal lines or phrases or ideas that float around in your head that you think listeners should know?

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  W I G M I, Wag Me.

• 1:17:22David Hoffman?

  Fantastic.

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say, you know, like I said earlier, be kind to everyone that's around you. I think, find ways to be happy about how you spend time on the internet. I think that one thing that I notice a lot is people hate social media. I think social media is fantastic. I think if you can learn to make social media a tool and not something that controls you, it's extremely, extremely valuable. And so even if you hate Instagram, even if you never post, please find a way to make it feel good to you because it's meant there to be curated. The algorithm gives back what you put into it and the ethos that you put into it. And so regardless of what platforms you're on, I think there is exponential value in building a brand, and specifically in niche communities. I think this is the thing that's going to make crypto really succeed, is you having social capital in a niche community. I was at a festival in Cancun this weekend for an artist named Millenium. 3,000 fans flew out to a destination festival, all to be around this one artist.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  They were all wearing jerseys. This guy was a deity in his local community, but there was 3,000 people there. And recreating that environment where it's like family-type ethos in different pockets of the internet is how I think that this space succeeds. And so if you are getting started in crypto today, find a local community to spend time in, find a way to become a contributor and not a speculator, and find ways to be comfortable with yourself online. Because I think your digital identity is going to be more important than your physical identity over a 10-year time horizon, and it's something that you need to start thinking about today.

• 1:18:34David Hoffman?

  Cooper, thank you for coming on Ladies Zero.

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, man. Fantastic conversation.

• 1:18:38David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Cheers.

• 1:18:39David Hoffman?

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• 1:19:22David Hoffman?

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