Interview with Nick Tomaino
Contents
Nick Tomaino is the founder and general partner of 1confirmation.
Let’s Get Digital
Max Raskin: Do you collect art?
Nick Tomaino: I collect crypto art.
MR: What's your favorite piece of crypto art you own?
NT: Beeple, Politics is Bullshit.
MR: Is it public how much you paid for it?
NT: Yeah. $500.
MR: How much is it worth now?
NT: You could go on OpenSea and see what it last traded for – somewhere around $100,000.
MR: You sold it?
NT: It’s an edition of 100. I haven't sold mine.
MR: Do you collect physical art?
NT: I've never cared about visual art until crypto, but now I love it.
MR: Do you love physical art as well?
NT: No. I’ll never own a piece of physical art.
MR: Kandinsky wrote a pamphlet called Concerning the Spiritual in Art – it’s fantastic. It’s very relevant for crypto.
NT: Art to me has always been this kind of pretentious thing that is not accessible to lots of people. And that's always turned me off about it. But what I love about crypto art is it's this very accessible thing that anyone can participate in.
MR: Do you display it?
NT: Yeah. We’ve got a few digital frames. The one I like the most is a Meural Canvas II. There’s a mobile app for it and you easily upload works and change what’s displayed.
“My Biggest Productivity Hack”
MR: Do listen to music when you work?
NT: Yeah.
MR: What do you listen to?
NT: Mostly hip hop.
MR: What kind?
NT: I like new hip hop. I've always loved new artists. I'm on Rap Caviar on Spotify a lot and other playlists.
MR: What were your three most listened-to songs last year?
NT: “Conversations” by Juice WRLD, “Flex” by Polo G, and “My Tears Ricochet” by Taylor Swift.
MR: I think of you as someone who's on the cutting edge of productivity technology. Do you have an app you recommend everyone gets?
NT: Yeah. It’s called Capture. My biggest productivity hack is lucid dreaming. Are you familiar with lucid dreaming?
MR: Oh yeah.
NT: Do you lucid dream?
MR: I went to Costa Rica for a summer and the anti-malarial meds made me. They were like fever dreams. But not since then. I am diligent about writing down most of the dreams I can remember, though.
NT: So that's what Capture does. It's a very basic app for lucid dreamers that allows you to record your lucid dreams. It tags things like dream signals, and it allows you to track patterns in dreams.
I don't know when, but at some point lucid dreaming is going to explode in popularity.
It’s still kind of this fringe thing right now, but we spend a third of our lives sleeping and today most people just go through that without getting anything out of it. Lucid dreaming allows you to be productive while you are sleeping by controlling your dreams. It’s changed my life.
Back in 2017 when I started to raise my fund and I also put on a crypto conference, I would have dreams about meetings and talks I was going to have and then I'd experience the meetings and talks in real life. It's like a deeper form of visualization and it allows you to be more effective in your real life.
Lucid dreaming is really hard to do consistently, but the basic way to start, like you do, is recording your dreams. Every morning the first thing I do is pop into this Capture app and record as much as I can remember about them.
MR: I must have thousands now.
NT: Do you think it helps you understand yourself better?
MR: Oh yeah. I don't do it for productivity, though. I do it to try to understand my unconscious and how I feel about things.
NT: Do you ever notice when you’re dreaming, you’ll recognize you’re in the dream?
MR: No.
NT: That’s what lucid dreaming is.
MR: I don’t do that, but I do agree that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
NT: I went deep down the rabbit hole back in 2017. There's this professor from Stanford named Stephen LaBerge who has written a bunch about lucid dreaming. There’s not lot of academic research on the topic. But LaBerge is one guy that's done a lot on it. He’s hosted an annual lucid dreaming conference in Hawaii and written a lot of great books on the topic.
One of the benefits of recording your dreams is you can recognize there are recurring settings, events, or people in your dreams that you don’t experience in real life. Once you start recording your dreams, you can actually recognize when you're in the dream by noticing a recurring pattern.
It's extremely difficult to lucid dream consistently, and I go in waves, but it can be a great productivity tool.
Responding
MR: What email interface do you use?
NT: Gmail.
MR: Do you have any interesting plugins?
NT: No.
MR: What about calendar scheduling?
NT: I've kind of dabbled with Calendly, but more or less Gmail and Google Calendar.
MR: I would have for sure thought that you would have had something kind of novel.
What about messaging apps? What do you use to message people?
NT: Signal is probably the most active these days, but I use everything. I use WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger to some degree for family.
MR: What about social media?
NT: Twitter is really the only social media that I care about.
MR: How good are you responding to emails?
NT: Pretty good – I respond quick.
Early in my career, I noticed that often the most successful people would respond the quickest, and so more or less it was kind of imitation. I try to respond very quickly, even if it's a short response.
MR: Are you an inbox zero person?
NT: No.
MR: What about to-do lists?
NT: No, no to-do lists.
MR: How do you keep track of what you need to do?
NT: I'm pretty unorganized when it comes to planning – I’m not a planner. I'll have things in my head that I know I need to do. I don't book a ton of meetings – I like to keep my calendar flexible and really just do whatever I want to do in a given day. With the fund we’ve dabbled with Notion boards. We kind of use that, but I'm not religious about it or anything like that.
Plugged-in Off-the-Grid
MR: Do you read fiction ever?
NT: Not really.
MR: Why not?
NT: I'm trying to get something out of most of what I read. I like reading about history, and I like reading about philosophy. Those are things that I can apply to my everyday life. I don't typically read for enjoyment – I read to improve myself and improve my understanding of the world. I just find that fiction, for me at least, doesn't really help as much.
What do you think?
MR: I disagree – I don't read as much fiction as I should. I'm the same way as you, but I think we're wrong. I think we should read more fiction because just like your dreams can give you insight into things – they’re not real – fiction and archetypes can give insights.
NT: Yeah, that's true. I read a lot of Girard, for example and a lot of his work is analyzing fiction – like Shakespeare – I like reading analysis of fiction.
MR: Freud, too.
Do you like science fiction?
NT: I go in waves I guess. I haven't been as much into science fiction lately. I read Ready Player One and Ready Player Two. I guess that’s an example of a fiction that I have read in the past. But right now, I’m kind of off sci-fi.
MR: What about TV?
NT: I'm not really into TV. I watch whatever my wife’s watching. I'm really plugged into the Internet. I probably spend way too much time on Twitter, but I actually think being plugged into the Internet helped me a lot in my life.
MR: How much time do you spend on your phone?
NT: Daily average is 4 hours, 47 minutes.
I think people are overly negative about people being plugged into the Internet. There’s certainly some negative effects. Being in control of being plugged into the Internet has been a huge benefit to my life and my career.
MR: It’s a distinction between active and passive?
NT: Yeah.
MR: If you’re a sixteen-year-old girl sitting on the Internet comparing yourself to other sixteen-year-old girls, it’s probably horrible for you.
NT: Yep.
MR: But you’re living in Tahoe right now. You’re living a hyper-plugged-in life and a deep off-the-grid life.
NT: Yes. True.
I like being away from people IRL but plugged into what's going on the Internet.
MR: Isn’t the Internet just people?
NT: The Internet is people that you want to be connected to – that’s the difference. In San Francisco, you're cooped up around a bunch of people that you don't have anything in common with. Living in Tahoe, you don't have to deal with people in your day-to-day life that you don't have anything in common with and you can be super connected to people that you want to be connected to.
MR: Other than crypto, are you a part of any community right now?
NT: Probably not.
MR: What about in the past?
NT: Sports. I grew up playing sports. I played football and basketball in college.
MR: Who’s your favorite basketball team?
NT: The Celtics.
But I don’t really care about sports anymore. I care about the future a lot more than the past.
MR: What about the present?
NT: I think I care about the present more than the past, but less than the future.
Mimetic Desire and T-Bone Steaks
MR: Are you religious at all?
NT: Yes. I’m Christian.
MR: Are you a believer?
NT: Yes.
MR: That’s unusual in the tech/crypto world.
NT: I've become a believer fairly recently actually, based on a lot of Girard’s writing. Christianity is a good mental framework to live in today's society. I don't really go to church.
MR: Do you believe in God?
NT: I believe in God, yeah.
MR: What do you think happens after you die?
NT: I don't know. I don't feel super strongly.
MR: If someone could convince you that God doesn’t exist, but you still thought the framework was a useful one, would you still abide by it?
NT: Oh, that's a really good question . . . yeah, that’s a tough question. I don't know.
MR: What do you drink during the day?
NT: Pretty much only water.
MR: What do you drink it out of?
NT: A Mason jar.
MR: How much water do you think you drink a day?
NT: Probably five of these [holds up Mason jar].
MR: Do you drink it with ice?
NT: No. Drinking water with ice is weird. If it's a hot day, then maybe.
MR: Do you filter it or anything?
NT: Yeah, we use a Brita.
MR: Do you drink any soda?
NT: I drank soda once when I was like six years old. I didn't like the carbonation.
MR: Do you drink coffee?
NT: No.
MR: How about tea?
NT: I like green tea if I’m feeling sick or something like that. It’s definitely not something that I have regularly.
MR: What about snacks? Do you snack during the day?
NT: Not really, no.
This is kind of cliché for Silicon Valley, but I intermittent fast. So I’ll have dinner and I don’t have breakfast and then I’ll have lunch at around 1:00 p.m. the next day.
MR: You don't eat pretzels or anything like that?
NT: No. I don’t have snacks during the day. At night I’ll have some Oreos.
MR: Do you have them with milk?
NT: Yeah.
MR: What kind of milk do you drink?
NT: Whole milk.
MR: Do you order in, or do you cook?
NT: We cook. There’s no delivery around here. My wife cooks, I don’t cook.
MR: What would you say is the mode thing you eat?
NT: Steak.
MR: What kind?
NT: Just T-bone.
MR: How often do you have it?
NT: Probably two or three times a week.
MR: How do you like your steak?
NT: Medium rare.
MR: Do you put anything on it?
NT: No. I actually like it plain. My wife likes to put seasoning on it, so sometimes we put seasoning on it.
MR: What about sauce?
NT: No. No sauce.
MR: What about sides?
NT: I like spinach. Usually I have scallops and bacon for lunch. After this, I'll probably throw some scallops and bacon on the grill.
MR: You don’t eat a lot of carbs.
NT: No, but not really by design.
MR: What about alcohol?
NT: No. I've probably had alcohol once, maybe twice in the past year.
Podcasts and Subreddits
MR: What about exercise during the day?
NT: I Peloton pretty much every morning.
MR: For how long?
NT: 30 or 45 minutes
MR: Do you have a favorite instructor?
NT: I guess if I had a favorite one it’d be Alex Toussaint, but I tend to listen to audio books, podcasts or YouTube talks rather than following the instructor.
MR: What are you listening to right now?
NT: Rene Girard’s The Scapegoat.
MR: What else do you listen to when you’re working out?
NT: Podcasts, audio books and YouTube talks. I don’t have any that I listen to regularly, but if there's a topic that I'm thinking about, I'll search it on Spotify and YouTube and listen to something about that.
MR: What's the topic you've been thinking about most recently?
NT: Decentralized identity.
MR: What podcast do you think you’ve listened to the most?
NT: That's a tough one. I like Eric Weinstein's The Portal. Last year especially, I listened to that often. I like Laura Shin’s Unchained.
MR: If you had to follow one person on Twitter?
NT: Vitalik [Buterin].
MR: When do you go to bed at night?
NT: Usually around 9:30 or 10:00.
MR: And when do you wake up in the morning?
NT: Between 5:00 and 6:00.
MR: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
NT: Take out my Capture App and write down as much as I can remember about my dream.
MR: And then what?
NT: Then I'll probably look at either my email or Twitter.
MR: Where do you get your news from?
NT: Twitter.
MR: Do you read any newspapers?
NT: No.
MR: Do you read any blogs regularly?
NT: No. There’s also Reddit.
MR: Which subreddits?
NT: r/ethereum is the main one.
MR: What about r/Bitcoin?
NT: Not as much. I was on r/Bitcoin a lot many years ago, but it’s not great these days.
But I use the Reddit app. I’m a sub to a bunch of them. I'll just scroll down and see what the Reddit app recommends to me.
MR: Are you a subscriber to anything unusual that I wouldn’t expect?
NT: r/LucidDreaming is one.
MR: Do you post?
NT: I have, yeah. My username is ntomaino. I’ve got a burner too.
r/Georgism is a good one.
MR: Like Henry George?
NT: Yeah.
Do you have thoughts on his theory?
MR: Yeah, I don’t like it.
The Ascension of Jake Paul
MR: What's your favorite restaurant in San Francisco?
NT: I honestly don’t care about restaurants at all, but my wife does.
MR: What's something you care a lot about that’s not crypto, philosophy, or politics? Do you have any stupid things you care about?
NT: Here’s one – I spend a lot of time observing culture and getting into different aspects of culture that are relevant in the moment. So right now, one thing that I'm pretty interested in is Jake Paul’s ascension in the world of boxing.
I love his story. He’s just a kid that got really popular on YouTube, and now is climbing the ladder in boxing. I watched his last fight against Ben Askren.
MR: Are you into MMA?
NT: I’m not that into MMA – that’s the thing – I like that it’s culturally relevant right now.
MR: It sounds like an anthropologist studying American culture.
NT: Yes, for sure.
MR: But it sounds like you’re an observer. Is there anything – like birdwatching – you yourself are obsessed about for its own sake – not mimetically?
NT: I’ll do what my wife wants to do – I care about family.
MR: Do you have any analog hobbies?
NT: I mean, not really. No. I would consider lucid dreaming a hobby.
MR: Yeah, but that’s also aimed at productivity.
NT: Yeah, exactly. When I’m reading, I’m kind of reading stuff that I think could help me. Again, I think the Jake Paul thing and watching boxing . . .
MR: But it’s very much like Girard – you’re watching it because other people are watching it.
NT: What’s culturally relevant is what's interesting to me. What’s on the fringes of being mainstream culturally relevant . . . that’s what I love paying attention to.
Music is definitely one. I love indie music. I've always loved identifying artists before they’re big.
MR: That’s a similar thing – you’re very interested in that bubble between weird and normalized.
NT: Yeah.
MR: Last thing, do you nap?
NT: No. Not at all.