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slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and we are lucky enough to have today with us

Michael Casey and Paul Vina authors of the recently released The Age of Cryptocurrency

and two Wall Street Journal journalists.

So welcome, guys.

Thanks for us to be here.

Also in the room is my partner in crime, Sonal Chuxi. Sonal. Hi, guys. Also in the room is my partner in crime, Sonal, Juxi.

Sonal. Hi, guys.

Look, the Wall Street Journal has the words Wall Street in it, and Wall Street hasn't been paying much attention to the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency until recently. And I wonder from your ends, did you have a sort of conversion where

you thought this is actually something I want to spend a lot of time and effort and energy

focusing on and writing about? Yes, absolutely. There were these moments. In fact, we've,

we go through it in the book. We codified it as these phases. And in fact, we realized when we sort of came up with this, this is Paul's framework.

But ultimately, we've realized as we do this, these five stages of Bitcoin, as we call it,

that that's actually something that a lot of people go through.

It seems to be actually a fairly common thing.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely happened for me. It definitely happened for Mike, where we went through a process of the first time I heard about Bitcoin, I was skeptical. I thought it was a scam. I thought I wasn't going to write about it. But you keep hearing about it. You keep getting interested. And I went through this. Mike went through it. And we talked to a lot of people that we interviewed for the book went through it too. And I realized that it's almost kind of, you know, it's like the Kubla Ross model, the five stages of grief.

So we wrote about it in the beginning of the book.

And in the stages, it's, you know, it's dismissal.

It's, it's disdain.

Your first row, one is disdain.

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