The Nomics Update

There's a concept in cognitive psychology called theory of mind, and theory of mind is the ability for someone to predict what someone else might be thinking in a given scenario. Young children have pretty horrific theory of mind. They're unable in most cases, you know, when kids are pretty young, to guess what a third party might be thinking [00:00:30] in a given scenario. They're unable to figure out or estimate what someone else might be thinking.

So an experiment that's done with very young children to figure out if they have developed theory of mind is a child who is being tested for theory of mind abilities might see a stuffed animal, and [00:01:00] the experiment or the person that's running this experiment would show the child that a stuffed animal sees a piece of candy. Then the researcher would cover up the eyes of the stuffed animal and put the candy in his or her pocket and then lift up the blindfold or whatever that's on the eyes of the stuffed [00:01:30] animal, and then ask the child who's seen all of this where the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is. And in most instances the child will tell the researcher that the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is in the researcher's pocket because the child ascribes to the stuffed animal what the child knows about where the candy is, even though during this experiment it was very evident [00:02:00] that the stuffed animal's eyes were covered when the piece of candy was placed in the experimenter's pocket.

And theory of mind is something that is commonly known to differentiate between people with and without autism. So people with autism are known for not doing especially well on theory of mind tests, but theory of mind [00:02:30] isn't just something that people with autism score poorly on. I've found through the years that most people who are looking to engage in business relationships don't have very good theory of mind at all. They don't spend much time trying to figure out what the person on the other end of a deal might be thinking, what a customer might be thinking, what problems [00:03:00] they'd be struggling with.

On a very, very small scale, it looks like salespeople who reach out to someone and try to set an appointment not using the time zone of the person that they're looking to set an appointment with. So let's say I'm in Chicago and I'm communicating with a salesperson in California, someone with highly [00:03:30] developed theory of mind, in my opinion, would give me times in my time zone, right, would relate to me on my own terms. They would also do some background and try and get a sense for what my pain points might be.

I encounter this lack of theory of mind or lack of consideration of theory of mind all the time when people pitch [00:04:00] me on coming onto the Flippening podcast, right, our popular podcast that often gets over 30,000 downloads an episode. People will pitch me on coming onto that podcast. They'll often asked to come on and talk about the same topic that someone else just spoke about. They won't say anything about how they'll promote the episode. They won't say anything about sponsoring [00:04:30]

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Something I've been really curious about for a long time are the methods of Wim Hof. Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete and a really likable guy. I've seen him interviewed several times and he doesn't have the typical stunt devil persona. He really seems to be coming from a great place and he is really into [00:00:30] breath and breathing and how that lets you go deeper into yourself. He's set a bunch of really, really remarkable world records.

For example, he holds the record for swimming the longest under ice without any wetsuit or anything else on, just wearing a pair of shorts. He at one time held the record for the fastest half-marathon barefoot [00:01:00] on ice and snow. He frequently swims in frozen water. He holds the record for the longest time in direct full-body contact with ice, which is pretty nuts. He's climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro wearing only shorts. 

But his program, which I'm going through and enjoying, I'm only one week into this, [00:01:30] his program is called The Wim Hof Method and it's a couple hundred bucks. It's really about breathing. It's almost a meditation and yoga course. He claims that this comes with a bunch of health benefits. I remember seeing a documentary about him where folks at a hospital in a very controlled environment ejected him with, I believe, a virus and he was able to fight it off [00:02:00] by breathing in a certain way, keep his temperature down, and it was a virus that could have brought a lot of harm to him unmedicated, but he beat it without medication.

But I'm going through this because of the benefits that it claims, better sleep, better energy, better mood, and [00:02:30] overall better mindfulness. The practice really takes, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes a day of breathing and taking cold showers. I don't know, I'm only a week in, or I have one week down. It might escalate quite a bit, but it's a lot of fun. I'm enjoying it.

I have already noticed that I am sleeping better, that I do have more energy throughout the day, that my mood is [00:03:00] generally better. I'm just generally happier. Maybe it's all this forced hyperventilation or something. But yeah, it's a good thing. This entry is definitely more on the journal side of the kind of topics that are covered by this podcast, but yeah, this is my personal audio journal. I think that a startup can only grow at the rate that a founder [00:03:30] is growing, so I try and do things like this to expand myself. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Maybe I'll report back after I'm done with the 10-week course.

But again, it's proving to be really enjoyable and it's amazing how good I feel after, you know, cold exposure, after taking a long cold shower. Alright, take care. Bye.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is offer you the opportunity to post thoughts and tips and experiences here on the Nomics Update. We've got a nice audience kind of aggregated around what we're doing. Each episode will get a few thousand downloads, and generally I think the people that listen are interested in a range of topics. [00:00:30] Everything from growing startups to crypto to personal development, so if you have a tip that you want to share on the Nomics Update, here's what I'll do. I'll take that tip from you. I'll introduce you and your company if you want, say a little bit about how folks can find you on Twitter, and then I'll roll the tip from you. 

So to send me a tip that you'd like to share with the audience, or an update or some thoughts [00:01:00] in general, you can go to claytelegram.com and just leave me an audio message there on claytelegram.com. Telegram has a really great asynchronous voice feature where you can leave a voice message. So just leave me a voice message at that location, and if I like it and I think it would be useful to the broader community that listens to this podcast, then I will [00:01:30] absolutely share it. All right. Take care. Bye.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

At Nomics, one of the things we don't talk about very often but something that's been really popular among our enterprise customers are our consultative or concierge data services. It's something that's a lot of fun because it allows us to partner at a deeper level with institutional investors, family offices, hedge funds, private investment offices, prop [00:00:30] shops, et cetera. It allows us to get to know a lot more about how these organizations use data, how they think about data, and how data is integrated with their trading strategy. Whether it's active strategy, and maybe they're running a real time trading environment or it's more of a passive strategy and they're looking for analysis on historical data sets for the purpose of [00:01:00] back testing and things like that.

But our concierge data services are really for organizations that make heavy use of crypto asset data. They either don't have an in-house development staff that can build out arrays of machines or the infrastructure necessary to run [00:01:30] pretty complex trading operations. That's fine. There's a lot of really brilliant investors and big data people at these places that are really great at what they do but they don't necessarily have a background in software development or they're too busy making money for their fun to set up some of this infrastructure at least to take the first pass [00:02:00] at some of this infrastructure.

They either don't have the in-house engineering resources or the people that could do this in the organization are too busy executing against strategies that they know work, and that they know make money and they come to us because they have a hypothesis around some things that might work, and they want to test a strategy. In most cases [00:02:30] when these folks come to us to have custom work done, to have concierge data services done or created, we're able to charge them a lot less than it would cost them to build it themselves from scratch even paying existing employees, or to farm this out because we're working with data and cryptocurrency data all day long, really. So, we have a lot [00:03:00] of the building blocks in place already to do this. We're usually not starting from scratch, we're usually not testing different ways to store this data or to ingest new data sources that they might need. We have a lot of these ingestion pipelines already in place if they need a strategy that scales across multiple machines, we have that infrastructure in place already.

I should note that, [00:03:30] to get started, it's usually again, less money than hiring someone to do this from scratch. But these services do start at 30 grand, for anyone I think, who has a fund of the size that would need these services, this usually isn't a problem at all, especially if you're a $20 million plus fund and [00:04:00] you're winning, and you have a hypothesis of what might work. This is really a drop in the bucket and certainly below market, well below market.

In fact, often we're able to charge sometimes, less than other firms might charge for just out of the box products that are already created. A little bit about [00:04:30]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

I think founders for the most part seem to, at least speaking for myself here, I think founders go through roughly a nine month cycle of founder failure that starts up, gets going, and then, repeats itself over, and over, and over again. The cycle's pretty simple. I think most founders when they start a company, if they're experienced, and they know what they're doing, [00:00:30] they start off doing a pretty good job. They've thought a lot about a given problem, and what they're looking to do when they first start a business, and they spend about three months being pretty good at their job. They know what their responsibilities are, what their duties are.

They've thought a lot about what needs to be done, and what order it needs to be done in, and all of that. After this first initial three months of being pretty good at [00:01:00] their job, if they're having any kind of success, there's getting, traction is developing, then usually the job changes. In any kind of fast evolving situation, a situation with a lot of momentum behind it, I think after the first three months the job generally changes, and often a founder, and this applies to many people in startups. I think anyone who's at an early [00:01:30] stage company might, after the first three months of having a general sense of what needs to be done.

After those first three months they realize that the job has changed, and often they don't know how it's changed. They just know that the things that they were doing initially weren't working, so after the first three months of doing a pretty good job at their job, I think they spend another three months learning how their job has changed, [00:02:00] and usually they learn why, they learn that their job is changing, and how their job is changing, because old things aren't working anymore. They start failing. Maybe at first they were doing a lot of meetings, but then they realized they need to start implementing, and they can't be on all the meetings that they were being ... That they were on before, and execute like they need to execute now that they have a sense of what needs to be done.

The second three months of the cycle is around learning how [00:02:30] the job has changed, and the nature of the differences that have emerged, and then, I think the last three months of this nine month cycle of founder failure is learning the new job, and what it entails, and what needs to be done to be successful in the new job, so creating the circumstances to be successful again, and then, [00:03:00] once they've learned what their new job is, the cycle starts all over again. To summarize, I think the three months cycle of founder failure, or the three months cycle of founder success, I guess that's a little bit more optimistic is that there's three months at being okay at your job, three months learning that your job has changed, three months learning the new job, and then, of course starting all over, being okay at your job again once you've learned what the new job is.

[00:03:30] I'm certainly right now in the phase where I'm learning my new job. I think, I was really, I think, I was doing a really great job for a while, then hired more people, got more customers, got a lot more traction to the website, and realized that things have started to change. The things that worked when there wasn't as much traction in the business, [00:04:00]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Hey, folks. I am pleased to tell you that the Flippening Podcast is back. It's been over a month since we published the last episode, and frankly, I didn't know if we were going to continue doing them. The Flippening Podcast, if you've ever heard if you've ever heard an episode, for example, the Security Token Documentary, it's something that takes a lot of time to put together, to put [00:00:30] content together in simple content that's produced at that level. There's a lot of scripting, there's scripting of intros and outros. There's a lot of post production editorial work, and frankly, there's a lot that goes into it. And I don't know honestly about every day or so someone hits me up and wants to be on the podcast, and often it's these podcast PR firms that [00:01:00] are trying to get their CEO or the CEO of a company that's hired them to be on the podcast, and I don't think they have any idea how much time I've put onto this. Someone casually shows up because they're doing a 'podcast tour', and we record them for an hour. And then after that, it's like hours of work go into getting that episode live probably. Probably eight hours per episode. No joke. 

[00:01:30] And so just to actually clarify, so far no one who's ever reached out to me to be on the Flippening Podcast has been booked with one exception. It's all been people I reach out to and ask. 

So we're starting the Flippening Podcast back up again, and like I might have said before, I didn't know if we were going to bring it back. Honestly, [00:02:00] I look at the top crypto podcasts and I would count the Flippening a couple months ago, I would put the Flippening in that category when we were releasing episodes on a regular basis. But the top crypto podcasts generally aren't run by people that are also CEOs of product companies. At least product companies in the software space versus perhaps the media space. And [00:02:30] that's because it takes a lot of time. So in the time that's past since we posted the last episode, a bunch of people reached out asking what had happened, and basically making the case for bringing it back. And we had an internal debate about whether or not to proceed with the podcast, and after a lot of deliberation, I decided it was worth doing but I needed some help. 

So [00:03:00] we hired someone who's going to be essentially the producer for the podcast. So we have an editor but now we have an editor and a producer, and they're going to be able to help with everything from concepting the shows to helping with distribution to concepting things. And it's really exciting. And I believe if all this goes right that [00:03:30] it's going to require much less of my time than it did before because of the producers who's job is going to be to focus on this. It's not a full-time position. They do other things as well. 

So anyway, lots of great stuff is on the way, and I think you can expect starting maybe starting next week ... I think you can expect [00:04:00] that episodes will be released every week, every single week, maybe even more frequently than that if we can get our act together. And as of today, hopefully by the time you're listening to this, but if not, a few hours after we release this, the first new episode will be live, which is actually part two of the deep dive we were doing on decentralized exchanges. 

So [00:04:30]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

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So Pravin, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly Pravin, but Pravin from Block.Kitchen wrote in with a question, and I'm gonna address it. First off, Block.Kitchen, I didn't even know there was a dot Kitchen domain name. There's just so many now, it's crazy. It's hard to follow. I'm always looking at these domain names and be like, "Wait, is this a dot com? It's a ..." That's the extension, dot Kitchen. Anyway, he wrote in [00:00:30] with a couple of questions. The first question he asked is this, if ... So here's the question, if you are not pursuing Nomics, what other business opportunities or categories in the blockchain space would you be executing on? Good question. So I think first and foremost I wanna mention that I really don't know. This question stumped me, and it's not like I have a [00:01:00] list of things in the back of my head that I'm just waiting to do. I'm very focused on what we're doing and in another update I'll speak about why I'm so excited about what we're doing in the Pathron and the problem that we're really solving, versus the problem that a lot of people think we're solving.

But the answer is, I can't think of anything of the top of my head. I'm very interested in distributed datasets [00:01:30] and in data platforms, which is really at the core of what we're doing at Nomics, and core to the infrastructure that we're building. Much of which people can't see. And right now there's just nothing that excites me as much as data platforms. By the way, data platforms as an interest, like I've never been interested in anything that bored people to death as much as data platforms, but they're really [00:02:00] exciting if you ever wanna talk data platforms. Sometime maybe can have that conversation if we see each other at a conference or something. I think all of this said, if I have to think about it for a bit and stretch, I think I'd be interested in blockchain based lending, so on the Flippening Podcast, my other podcast, I did an interview with [00:02:30] Nadav Hollander from Dharma. I'm very impressed with what they're doing, I think that is potentially the killer use case, or one of many killer use cases.

And if you look at US bond markets, they're bigger than the stock market, and both the bond market and the stock market individually are much larger at the into money supply, which is just the amount of money people have in [00:03:00] back accounts and savings accounts and cash. And that doesn't even include ... The bond market doesn't even include personal loans and household debt and things like that. So, I think there's a ton of opportunity there, everyone borrows money and because of hurdles around user experience and knowledge, access to technology. I don't know that the average [00:03:30] person would use Bitcoin just to use it unless they live in a place like Argentina or Venezuela and there isn't another reliable form for storing value, there isn't another reliable means of doing that. Obviously if you live in a place where the banking system is terrible, then Bitcoin is potentially a great place to put your money, I don't know, I don't give [00:04:00]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

I got an invite to be interviewed for actually a pretty cool thing. The problem is it's not a interview where we get on the phone and they interview me and then they take notes and publish that. It's an interview where they send me a list of questions, and I need to answer them, and I'm bad at getting to these things. Normally, [00:00:30] I don't do these kinds of interviews just because it's hard to make the time for them, to sit down and write out all my answers, but when there's upside for it and I can justify my use of time this way, I'll go ahead and do it from time to time.

One of these things came in. It's a series of questions. What I'm probably going to do is record the answers and have them transcribed [00:01:00] and have a content person on my team turn it into an article and send that in. 

You guys, today, you folks ... I guess guys is not ... It's not cool to say "guys" anymore, and I'm not making fun of people who say, "It's not cool to say 'guys' anymore," but you can't say "guys" anymore, so I'm saying "folks" from now on. You folks get to hear my answers to these [00:01:30] questions for a few days here as I answer them because I don't even know that I would record the answers in audio format to get transcribed to send to a content person on my team if I couldn't publish it on the show, so thanks for listening as I do this. 

The question one that I need to answer for this is, what is your background, [00:02:00] and how did you get into crypto?

I don't know that I've told this story before. What's my background? Nomics is second software company, and before doing this, I co-founded a company called Leadpages, which now that corporate entity is called Drip, and they create a eCommerce CRM, [00:02:30] and we acquired Drip and it ended up being such a big thing, but the company pivoted around for lots of reasons, and I think it's a smart move. My previous company was Leadpages. I was the CEO of that company, grew that to over 150 people, raised 38 million in venture capital.

In [00:03:00] I think late 2013, arguably the second, but, really, the first year of that company, we hired someone on our devops team who came to us from Best Buy, and now they live in Palo Alto and work at Facebook, and are doing really cool things over there. I think they did cool things for us, as well, but that person got me into Bitcoin, [00:03:30] and he was a miner. I live in Minnesota. Minnesota winters are notoriously cold, so he had his mining equipment in his basement and claimed that, on some days, it produced enough heat to heat his house. It's kind of a cool dual use of that electricity, but he got me into Bitcoin. He started talking about it quite a bit, and I'm not sure [00:04:00] most people spent much time listening to him speak about it, but I was fascinated. It combined things that I was interested in, which was economics and money and computers and the Internet, so it's like this combination, this amalgamation of things that I'm intensely interested in, and it just made sense. It just clicked to me. 

There are so many [00:04:30] things that or so many businesses or projects or companies that were analog, and then another company came by and created a digital version of it, and then it could, that product or that idea, the function that was executed by that product, could hop on the back of Moore's law and go exponential, [00:05:00]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

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So back in the day I said I'd answer questions if you send them in. I believe also at the end of each episode I mentioned that I'll answer questions that folks submit as well. So I got a question from Casey. And they asked who inspires me in this space? What companies or individuals inspire me?

So I thought about this a little bit and the first person that came to mind was Andreas [00:00:30] Antonopoulos. I hope I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. I think there's a good chance that I'm not. But when I was first getting involved in this space, his content and his thoughts, and his wisdom influenced me more than anyone else. This is someone who spent his own money and lost money at first. And frankly had to cash in quite a bit of his Bitcoin to fiat to fund his travels where he'd go [00:01:00] to conferences and speak often for free before he could command a stipend.

He's created a lot of different videos and man, just really, really deepened my understanding of this space. And I'm so grateful to him. So he's first and foremost on this lesson. When I think of someone who speaks for Bitcoin, no one officially speaks for Bitcoin, [00:01:30] but I really think he is probably the most influential spokesperson on behalf of Bitcoin. And I've just learned so much from him, not just about bitcoin but about the lightening network, and a bunch of other things. Really great guy. I've bought, I believe, all of his books. I am a member of his Patreon community. I believe for awhile there I was donating $250 a month [00:02:00] to him just because I was so grateful for his contributions. I think the second company on this list is really the Dharma Protocol.

I think lending is way underrated as a use case. The bond market is much bigger than the stock market, and both the bond market and the stock market are bigger than circulating into [00:02:30] cash supply, at least in the United States. And everyone borrows money. Rich people borrow money, poor people borrow money. The middle class borrows money. It's just an important function of a well operating economy. And I believe that when lending, on the blockchain that when it's working and the incentives are correct, and it's functioning at scale, [00:03:00] I really believe that this has the potential to be the killer app that brings in millions of people. Because most people won't switch to Bitcoin just because it's neat, or it's cool, or even because it's censorship resistant, right? Unless they're in a place with a horrible banking system, and don't have access to USD accounts or other stable forms of wealth.

Most people aren't going to make that switch, especially when you consider [00:03:30] the amount of knowledge that's required to use Bitcoin. And also a lot of the UX hurdles. The user experience hurdles that exist. But I believe there are a lot of people that don't have access to loans that will find a way to make it work, right? Even if they've got to go into an internet cafe and navigate a pretty difficult process to get a loan. So I think loans, blockchain based loans [00:04:00]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

So I got a second question from Pravin. Pravin, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, from block.kitchen. Again, man I didn't even know there was a .kitchen domain extension. I'm perplexed by these, just this infinite number of domain names available now. And the prices all over the board. Sometimes you'll see like .blue domains [00:00:30] are like $100 a year and then there'll be some other kind that's like 15 cents. Anyway, I don't understand that business very well. 

But Pravin wrote in and asked a question that I was trying to dodge, but I told people I'd answer questions so I'm going to do it. He even wrote in and revised this question, but I'm going to answer the original question. Sorry. I'm going to answer the original question. 

So he asked what my, I don't know why I'm chuckling [00:01:00] here, but he asked what my morning ritual looks like or my morning routine. And the reason why I laugh is because back in the day, a long time ago, I used to be a personal development blogger right after college because I thought I knew something about personal development. And the truth is I think I probably know very little about personal development. 

But I learned a lot about marketing back then and about blogging and about growing an audience, [00:01:30] none those skills I'm using to actually grow this podcast, which I spent no time promoting at all. Other than I think I have this automated thing that tweets every time I put out a new post. 

So onto this question, but I want to preface this by saying that this used to be the obsession of like productivity bloggers. If you've followed productivity bloggers, basically the space that created [00:02:00] like Tim Ferriss or if you've been following the Getting Things Done Movement. There was this blog back in the day, it's still around, called Zen Habits. But everyone used to blog about their morning routine. There were all these blog posts about how to build a habit of getting up early in the morning. I think, really I think all that stuff is BS.

All right, I'm not going to digress here too much but there have been studies on [00:02:30] different chrono types. And that's just a fancy way of saying people that have certain proclivities around when they get up and when they go to bed. Most people have this flexible chrono type where if they work on it, they can get up early. And most, I mean it's like a majority, but I don't think it's significantly over 50%. 

But most people are in this kind of flexible chrono type category where, [00:03:00] like I said, they can train themselves to get up early or train themselves to get up late, they're flexible. But then there's this early riser, chrono type that tends to be much more organized and less creative, although there's certainly creative people that do get up early in the morning. This just about averages. And it is very hard for them to do anything other than get up early, like that's just how their body is wired. 

And then there's people with this sort of late [00:03:30] rising chrono type that can get up like I don't know, they get up later and they need to sleep in the morning. It's when their body produces certain hormones. They tend to be less structured and how they think and less organized and more creative. 

And if you're in either of those buckets, you really can't change this. And it's just, it's really absurd, kind of this cult around getting up early. There's that quote by, I believe Benjamin Franklin who said early [00:04:00]

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