One of the reasons I started this blog is I am the type of person who works things out talking about them, and who loves to get to express themselves. In 2020 I had the idea to start a podcast as a way to express myself, and maybe find a way to connect to like minded people. I am always following my own adventures with technology, but in many ways it is a lonely path because few people in my IRL can keep up. I hoped that online I could find people that could relate with me on those levels too.
Sometime around 2018 I had the realization that my social media connections were mostly just people I knew from high school or college that I barely kept up with in my then current life. I had the depressing realization that as I was aging that circle was shrinking as I slowly lost the momentum I had from my college years, a time when I often felt like the life of the party and when I purposefully didn't connect with some people because I "had enough friends." The version of me that existing in 2020 no longer felt that way, I hadn't frankly felt cool in a while and I had not made a new friend in years. An average post from me on Instagram would barely get any likes, maybe maxing around 30 if it was a really cute picture of Finn. It was depressing. I also felt like I had something to say but no one to say it to. For me, the concept of starting a podcast was a way to fix these problems in my life.
Lindsey was very supportive of these efforts, and even bought me an audiobook that went over how to start a podcast. It was full of good advice, but it also intimated me. The book pushed big for diversity, and often talked about how to manage guests and co-hosts. I was planning on just cranking out the podcast myself, which felt underwhelming given that the internet is full of middle aged white guys like me sharing their random opinions. I knew if I put in the effort and my only audience was my family and my college friend circle I would be upset, so I put the idea on the shelf.
In 2021 I really got into NFTs and that became one of the larger technical hobbies of my lifetime. Part of what made NFTs so appealing is Jeremy got sucked into them too, and it was the first time I had a shared tech interest with a good friend since Adam and the Switch in 2017. NFTs were the perfect mix of community, technology and IRL friendship and the fact that I could sustain my hobby by flipping some of them for profits made it something that felt like I could manage for a while.
So I came up with an idea to start a podcast around NFTs. When I looked there weren't many, as most of the NFT space relied to Twitter Spaces to do the same thing. The concept was for me to write stories about our NFTs and read them on the podcast, along with current events. We called it NFT Tales, and I even rolled out a webpage to go along with it. I had written one story about my Uninterested Unicorns and it got a good response in that community, so I decided to lean in and finally pull the trigger on the podcast.
At first it was rough going, as we fought platforms and equipment. But eventually we hit a cadence and it became a regular part of life. I got to the point where sitting down to record with Jeremy was my favorite part of the week, and I was putting a lot of effort into trying to think of good content. What never really followed was an audience, early on we got around 30 consistent listeners and even though I appreciated that despite my efforts to improve the quality of the podcast it really never grew beyond that.
To try and find an audience I hatched a plan to be more social in the Web 3 space. In 2021 my journey in that world was mostly alongside Jeremy, but in early 2022 I began to be more active in the discords of communities I had bought into and I worked to increase my Twitter follower count from the 29 I started that year with. Early on my plans were frankly kinda cynical, I wanted to leverage the connections I was making to fill in some paint-by-the-numbers content I assumed an audience wanted. I thought that the reach of two middle aged dudes were always going to be limited in a crypto space increasingly filled with Gen Z and women, so I hoped to bring those voices into the podcast too. But as if by accident my originally planned connection with the communities unlocked within me what apparently was a long-held desire to expand my social circles. For much of 2022 I lived more online than in the real world (much to the detriment of my real world relationships in retrospect), and in that space I found a way to elevate my status that suddenly made my Web 3 journey about more than a podcast.
Especially once I got into memeing, I found my social circle exploding in size online. More than just that, I felt COOL again for the first time since college. I had people wanting to network with me, and suddenly I found personal support in a way I never expected to. This culminated with my 40th birthday that year, an event that didn't get much fanfare in my household or in my friend group, but was celebrated by a virtual event with dozens of new connections online. Jeremy didn't really click that much with many of the new connections I was making, mostly women as I found out they were my natural "tribe" in this new online world, but I tried to bring these experiences into the podcast and eventually we even welcomed a third co-host that I felt finally made our podcasting efforts live up to the potential I learned from the book Lindsey got me. Our new co-host Rosio, a young woman from New York, shared a lot of our interests and taught me a lot of Gen Z lingo and framing. In many ways the sum total of this experience felt like a youth serum, I felt like I was in my 20s again instead of being a middle aged man. My Twitter follower count from from 29 in 2022 to over 2000 people. It was a huge rush of self worth.
Unfortunately this larger social network full of new connections, and the added co-host, did not translate back to the podcast audience. Even as my online network grew the podcast audience remained locked in around the 30-50 range that we basically started with. In June of 2022 I went to New York for a conference called NFTNYC and there I tried to make my virtual connections into being real world ones. In some ways I succeeded, but also when at NFT events the façade that I was this young popular guy melted away. I felt a little out of place around all the younger folks IRL, and even those who were my age had a lot more going on in their non-online life than I did. Even worse I found myself not able to attend some of the cool parties because I lacked the right NFT or didn't know the right folks to get in, which made me feel rally jaded about my experience in the space.
When I got back from that trip I realized that my enthusiasm for both the podcast and Web 3 had been damaged. I tried my best to use the connections I did make there to leverage into even more connections, and for a while this additional expansion of my online social circle felt great. But I found it hard to get these new online "friends" to care about my podcast with Jeremy and Rosio and the overall decline of the NFT market as the 2021 bubble began to pop meant that my original dream of the year to build up the podcast never quite worked out. Eventually Rosio wasn't as available, and I realized that the podcast with just me and Jeremy was kinda shouting into a void. On top of that the expenses of the podcast was causing problems for me at home as NFT flipped stopped making money, as well as the dedicated time it demanded. I wanted that time to explore expanding my skillset in the space to get into video memeing and other production skills that weren't just tied to audio.
So I eventually told Jeremy I wanted to move on. He was pretty upset at first, but the reality was as the money left the space so did his interest in NFTs. By that fall when we went to visit my sister in Cincinnati it had basically all unwound and me and Jeremy didn't talk for a bit. I did good for a while pivoting into a new format of short videos to tell my opinions, and the videos would get about 10x the views of the podcast with very little costs. But by 2023 the hours it took me to produce those videos burned me out some, that combined with the fact that I did a lot of my online socializing in the wee hours of the morning instead of sleeping. But I had fun making those videos, and for the first time since I started the podcast journey I felt like my opinion was being heard by the size of audience I hoped to have from the start.
In January 2023 my personal sacrifices for this effort all hit me and suddenly not only did I feel my age again, I felt even older because the year of running around online had caught up to me. By that point the NFT bubble was over, and many of my favorite people I had connected with in the space had moved on back to their pre-Web 3 lives. I decided to hitch my wagon to my favorite project, the Fame Ladies, and become part of a new community council that was forming to manage the project. This kept me from abandoning the progress I made socially during my year of really trying to be that in Web 3, and soon I started a regular online stream with a woman in that community- Jilly- that scratched the "podcast" itch without any of the cost or the time it took to make videos. Because these Twitter Spaces were tied to that community it had a built in audience that wasn't larger than my old podcast but was more vocal (during our podcast run I very rarely got feedback from anyone listening). I felt like I had balance for a while.
I did these Twitter spaces well into 2024, when eventually their regular cadence wore me down and I had to quit. The damage that a year of living online had caused to my IRL became really apparent to me this year, and it became hard to justify the time I was spending online when it robbed from how present I was in a critical part of Finn's early life. I am still apart of the online community and council at this moment, and I have tried to use what is left of my Web 3 life to stay inspired to grow personally. Like for example now I mostly leverage my follower count to push out AI art I create that is related to my most famous NFT. This gives me a bit of personal support that I appreciate in life, and the memory of being a cool person in 2022 is a positive feeling I will likely take to my grave.
On this last part- the personal support- one other pivot I made in 2024 was to invite people from my Web 3 world into my normal one. In 2021 and 2022 I lived behind my NFT and made sure my real life stayed on Instagram and my Web 3 life stayed on Twitter. But I gave that artificial demarcation up, and soon I started making connections on Instagram with the people who I connected with during my web 3 journey on Twitter. In doing so I gained something I never expected to find but was happy to get: my primary social circle grew. Now my posts on Instagram get about double the likes from 2020, as my IRL social circles from college intermingle with my NFT social circles. This allows me to carry forward a little personal momentum from that period into my future, which is something I am grateful for.
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