Welcome to Cryptomania, the newsletter, a preview companion to my book with the same title, which arrives next week, on August 6. The book traces the pandemic-era rise and fall of cryptocurrency, largely unfolding over 20 short months between March 2021 and November 2022. Pre-order Cryptomania here.
The minute I signed my book contract 17 months ago, I had a panic attack. One refrain kept recycling through my head: When someone keeps pushing their limits, they inevitably fail. I felt like I had created a trap for myself and was walking straight into it.
Obviously, that mantra is short-sighted for many reasons: it hinges upon a false dichotomy; it ignores both the cyclical nature of success and what can be learned from the process itself.
Sitting now one week from publication: Even if Cryptomania is a bad book (although people I trust seem to like it!), I'm never going to consider it a failure, because I learned so much along the way. Writing the book was an absolute slog. It was hard from minute-to-minute, day-to-day, and especially month-to-month. But I learned a lot about myself and the world. Some general thoughts:
Chop it up.
Early on, I realized that thinking about the book as a whole would send me into a spiral of existential dread. So I chopped up the book into small goals, and then those goals into smaller tasks. I ran many 25-minute pomodoro sessions with my bud Jacob, inching towards 900 words a day. Some days I would devote myself only to reading or listening to podcasts, whether about macroeconomic theory or the colonial history of the Bahamas. Others would be only be writing and restructuring a single page. It was only through trying to accomplish small goals I could hold in my mind every day that I was able to make any sort of progress.
Embrace the terribleness of the first draft.
For the first three months, I wrote without revising large chunks, focusing only on hitting my manuscript's word count of 80,000 words. When I hit that number, I rejoiced and then began reading it back—and boy, was most of it shite.
But at the very least, I had words on the page, which allowed my reader/editor brain to kick in. And at that point, it was much easier to mold words than to create new ones from scratch. I went through the manuscript in pen several times, tearing it up and building it back up anew.
Journalism is at least 65% empathy.
Writing a reported non-fiction book is like putting together a giant puzzle, in which subjects are plugged in like puzzle pieces. Sometimes I would go into an interview with a heist-y mindset: enter, extract the loot, and exit as fast as possible. But I found this almost never worked, because the interviewee would realize very quickly they were being used, and (rightfully) close off.
I interviewed a lot a lot of people who actively didn’t want their story told. The only way I was able to get through to them was to get them to trust me: for them to feel that I was treating them like a human; that I was actually hearing them and their lived experiences; that I wasn’t going to fuck them over. And none of that can be faked (unless you’re a sociopath like Sam Bankman-Fried). I learned a lot about patience; about reading and responding to emotional cues; about running into personal boundaries that I just wasn’t going to permeate, and being okay with that.
People want something to believe in—and once they do, beliefs are sticky.
Why did so many people jump into crypto over the pandemic? Crypto presented an alluring, cohesive vision that appealed to a certain kind of person’s sense of self: iconoclasts, autodidacts, terminally online pseudo-philosophers, rebels without a cause. More than a technology or a monetary system, it became a posture; a signaling of a tribe. And once this idea worked its way down deeply into someone’s self-identity, it proved remarkably resilient. That’s why so many victims of the FTX crash vowed to put whatever they could recover back into crypto, as crazy as it sounds.
Crypto, like many other religions, has canonical texts, disciples and preachers, and digital congregations. Religions can exist for thousands of years, even in the face of overwhelming evidence debunking their central claims. They just need to give their followers something to believe in. And crypto has transcended code to become a belief system and a way of life.