加密货币就此永远改变（FT. Thiccy）

Thank you, Thiccy. Welcome to the stream, man. How are you, dude?

Good, good. Thanks for having me.

I know. I’m excited for this one. It’s good to see you again. I think the timing of this is important. I warned the stream that it might not be the most optimistic outlook they’ve ever heard, but I think it’s an important one. You did a really good job on Saturday Spaces. That was a really solid listen. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, I appreciate it. It all happened because you told me this would be a great time to stream. All these streaming efforts have been because of you.

I know. I’m listening, and I’m depressed.

It wasn’t meant to be depressing. But, yeah—

They’re important, though, and I’m excited to cover some of this today. To start, why don’t you give a quick introduction to who you are, how you got here, and then we can get into some details?

Yeah. I started trading crypto in early 2023. Before that, I had worked on a crypto startup, and before that, I was a quant trader for a high-frequency trading firm. I think I just got very lucky with the timing of when I got into crypto. It was right after the FTX crash, when everything was down in the dumps, and I basically rode a three-year bull market up.

People always like to say that the environment you first get started in crypto in really imprints itself on your mind. Luckily for me, it was a period of intense PvP. It was hardcore people trading tiny-size coins, with a lot of pump-and-dumps, crime, and manipulation. I think it helped me hone my execution skills, chart reading, market timing, and very low-time-frame execution. That’s the backbone of a lot of my edge now.

How would you describe your trading style and the areas you generally focus on in the market?

I like to think about it as having a bag of tricks. You pick up more and more tricks as you stay in the market. At the start, the tricks were much more low-time-frame and focused on scalping. I’d see that someone was clearly executing an order, and as soon as that order ended, the flow would revert.

A lot of that was trading off Twitter narratives and liquidation events. As you begin to see more and more cycles, you start picking up longer-term pattern recognition. You learn how long, approximately, a bullish narrative takes for a certain type of coin, and you become better at timing things.

It’s gotten a lot more long-term, thematic, and cycle-based than when I started. I think that’s the path for most traders who get into this space.

I think that makes sense. I like the bag-of-tricks framing. That’s really sharp. It’s like basketball, you know? You have a few moves.

Yeah. You might have a few. I’ve got a couple more.

I want to lay the groundwork for how you think about things. To zoom out and start with a broad question, what do you think has happened to crypto, and what do you attribute its general underperformance and disappointment over the last year and some change—probably since the Trump coin on January 17, 2025?

Yeah. Let me think about how to start. Broadly, markets are a very interesting truth-discovery machine. In this case, they’re trying to answer: What is this asset that we’re trading? What is Bitcoin? What is Ethereum? What are alts? The narrative around each of those things has constantly been in flux. It has overshot and undershot, and we’ve shaved off parts of the narrative that we realized weren’t the truth.

Ever since I started, the biggest narrative used for the initial pump was that Bitcoin was a store of value and that it was getting an ETF. All these flows that couldn’t access it before would be able to access it. The ETF brought us from roughly $20,000 to $70,000.

The second wave came in 2024 with Trump’s election. The big thing underpinning it was that Bitcoin was getting institutional and presidential support, and that eventually there would be a strategic Bitcoin reserve where they would buy Bitcoin. That didn’t really happen.

But I guess the third wave of the narrative was that people were buying Bitcoin with DATs and MSTR, and everyone could access it in their 401(k), with a leveraged expression of it instead of having to buy spot. This mattered more for ETH and alts.

Yeah, those are the three waves I’d identify as answers to the question, “What is this thing that we’re trading?” Each retains some of the truth, while other parts of those narratives have been shaved off and discarded.

I don’t know exactly how to frame this question, but how do you think about the impact of narrative versus price? When we talk about these narratives that have gotten Bitcoin to certain prices, there’s a lot of narrative overhang right now. There’s quantum FUD. Bitcoin has become a sort of Trump proxy asset, which makes it uninteresting to the same people who are buying gold. There was initially this digital-gold narrative that’s potentially being invalidated right now.

How do you gauge the importance of these narratives, and how much of it is simply that price is up or price is down and we’re looking for things to attribute to the way they’re trading?

It’s a good question. I think price and narrative are reflexive—it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Sometimes it lags, and people say that price leads narrative, but people obviously have a reason for doing things. A lot of the time, when that reason is consensus among everyone, things happen. If a piece of news comes out and everyone buys because of that news, it’s clear, roughly, why something went up.

I view it as a self-reinforcing process. If an asset constantly reacts to a certain type of new information in a certain way, that reinforces the idea among market participants that this is what you’re supposed to bid when that happens. It trains that causality into people’s brains. Eventually, if it keeps doing that, it becomes, “This is what this asset is.”

It takes a long time to untrain that behavior. If it’s been doing this for three years, it takes a long time to convince people that it was just an artifact of a regime that no longer applies. It needs a lot of negative reinforcement for people to finally give up and say, “This thing actually doesn’t do that.”

I think it’s unclear whether we’re going through that process right now in Bitcoin. We aren’t being rewarded for the same types of narratives we used to get rewarded for. The biggest example was when Silicon Valley Bank failed and everything went down, and then suddenly Bitcoin was the only asset that ripped 50%. That was a huge reinforcement event for the idea that Bitcoin was the asset to long when there was chaos in the streets and the traditional order was breaking down.

Now that’s happening in 2026, and people aren’t being rewarded for that behavior. It’s questioning the entire narrative. That’s how I’d describe what’s going on right now.

Yeah. As Bitcoin is where it is right now, I find myself reading Twitter too much and probably overthinking some of these things. I keep bouncing from, “Okay, this narrative is the reason why,” and then that gets validated or invalidated. Then it’s another narrative. It’s hard to gauge what’s actually important and what’s just noise.

How do you think about the narrative for Bitcoin right now? To start with crypto more broadly, what would validate its success moving forward, or invalidate its failure as time goes on?

I think now is especially tough because there are these one-time overhangs that are distorting the truth-discovery process. We had all this one-time flow come in through the ETFs, the DATs, and MSTR, and it’s crowding out organic demand. It might have brought forward a lot of demand from the future and jammed it all into the present.

Now it’s working through that huge price movement, so it’s hard for Bitcoin to react to events the way it should.

Interesting. Did you want to add to that, or no?

Yeah. What was the original question again? I lost track. Sorry.

I was asking where you think the current narrative for Bitcoin is. What would you want to see to validate its future success, or invalidate its inevitable failure? Basically, both sides.

Well, I mean, I think the canonical dream narrative is that this is the thing that becomes the next monetary system. It’s the new form of order. It sort of solves the problem of chaos and anarchy when the old global order fails, when people lose trust in the fiat system.

People are definitely losing trust in the fiat system, but the marginal bidder—the marginal demand—is not flowing into Bitcoin. It’s flowing into gold right now instead. There are a lot of ways you can view that. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that people aren’t afraid of the global order failing. I think it’s more that the people who are afraid and have money to allocate are buying gold instead, because they’re mostly based in the East.

Everyone has had basically 2 years to allocate all of their cash into assets because they’re worried about hyperinflation, so there might not be that much extra spare money left. Typically, everyone in the West just shoves their money into equities, and that’s how they store their value. In the East, China’s M2 money supply is more than double the amount that the US has, and they can’t really invest in their equities. Their equities don’t do that well because the government artificially suppresses them, and there aren’t many places the money can go. You can’t leave the yuan, right?

So this is an escape valve for them. You could view it as almost the way I’m interpreting it right now—which may turn out to be true or false—that the Chinese have realized what the Americans realized 2 years ago: that they need to escape their currency into an asset. Because they can’t invest in their equities, they’re shoving it into gold and silver.

Why do you think gold and silver—and then maybe AI, but we could talk about that separately—are basically stealing the Bitcoin and crypto flows and outshining them right now? That wasn’t something I had really considered as having a realistic chance of happening. Maybe that was just naive, but I think it caught a lot of crypto people by surprise. It was like, “Holy shit, how is this happening?”

Yeah, I think people in the West don’t have a very strong theory of mind for people in the East, mainly because the language is different and the internets are completely separate worlds.

So you just have no idea? Even the journalists, academics, and other important people don’t really know how to model Chinese thinking very well. Were you modeling this? How do you model Chinese thinking?

No, I don’t know either. I grew up here.

It wasn’t a pointed question. I felt like that’s a trader question, dude.

No, no, no. Yeah, I don’t know. My dad will tell me something—he watches Chinese TikTok and tells me about these trends that they’re doing—and it’s completely foreign to me. But I guess the point I was trying to make was that they’re very separate things.

It’s very easy to think that everything I’ve experienced represents the totality of what exists in the world. I think that explains some of the bewilderment toward this move. This is some serious money flowing through. Gold is worth $30 trillion, and silver is worth $6 trillion. Those are multiples of the crypto market cap, and they’re increasing.

It’s clear that there’s enough money in the world to pump Bitcoin to $1 million. It’s more a question of how we get these people to actually allocate that money—what we convince them of, essentially. One sort of Faustian bargain, or deal with the devil, that Bitcoin has made is that it has heavily integrated itself with the US. It kind of sold its soul for a quick pump.

It sold about 10% of its supply—or something like 6% of its supply—is in US ETFs and MSTR. So it kind of hurts its neutral, credible, third-party reserve-asset thesis, because it’s viewed as America’s Trump coin now.

Okay, so, on your initial point that the East is buying gold and silver, people have always thought about Bitcoin as the debasement trade. When, post-2023 Russia-Ukraine, central banks started fleeing US exposure, they were supposed to buy Bitcoin. They bought gold.

I feel like there’s been a lot of fear-mongering on the timeline that we’re entering the end times and that this is all sophisticated central-bank flow into metals. But it does feel like, especially with how quickly gold and silver snapped back, a lot of it could just be speculative capital—a retail bid. I don’t know how you entirely think about that.

Then, doubling down on Bitcoin being a Trump-US proxy, that’s a relatively new thought to me. I hadn’t really considered how impactful Bitcoin becoming a Trump-America proxy could be until the last couple of months. But it feels impactful, right? If central banks and foreign powers are hammering metals because they’re trying to flee US exposure, it makes sense why they wouldn’t really touch Bitcoin. I know that’s messy, but what do you think about that?

Yeah. I think there are 2 things. One is that central banks are buying, but I don’t think they’re buying enough. This price action feels more like Chinese grandmas frothily buying as much as they can. It feels like retail jamming money into it, rather than central banks. Central banks definitely account for some of it, but they don’t typically fight this quickly for things like this.

It’s a good narrative that helps you think, “Even if I go all in on this thing, it’s not going to go to zero because central banks are buying it.” It gives you a little bit of safety, which adds more convexity to the trade.

The second thing is the America coin. What did you say about the America coin again?

I was just relating it back to narrative versus price. I hadn’t really considered how impactful Bitcoin becoming a Trump-America proxy could be, but it seems impactful. If banks and central banks are trying to flee American exposure, then—

Yeah. If it has American exposure, then it does well with America and it does poorly with America. Right now, we’re in a regime where there’s a lot of doubt about American power and hegemony, so it kind of suffers from that.

Central banks also don’t really need Bitcoin. The appeal of Bitcoin is very libertarian: if you’re an individual, how do you transport your wealth across state lines or across the globe? Anything over $1 million in gold is too cumbersome to transport, whereas it doesn’t matter if you’re moving $1 billion or $1 in Bitcoin. It’s the same amount of work.

For a central bank, getting a ship, an armored vehicle, and some guards is nothing. To a civilization, that’s easy to do. The reduction in effort and the portability matter less to a civilization than they do to an individual.

This is an important distinction to make, because one of the biggest trends we’re seeing in civilization right now is the K-shaped economy. It reflects the fact that the developments of civilization are different from the developments of the individual person, and the individual person matters less and less. People are disposable, and they’ve become a lot more disempowered than they were in the past.

It might not matter that all of China can’t speak freely. It might not matter that people have these individual freedoms, as long as the overall machine survives. So that attacks the Bitcoin case a little bit.

Could you explain how you want to position and exist within a K-shaped economy if that idea accelerates, as an individual?

A lot of it depends on your relative stats. First, you should always prioritize accumulating enough wealth and resources to essentially be emancipated from labor, so you don’t have to worry—you can survive off your interest.

That shifts your mindset from an offensive standpoint into a defensive one. The defensive game becomes: how do I maintain my wealth, and how do I keep up with the growth of the rest of the world?

Is there a particular game—the offense or the defense—that you want to talk about?

Probably offense, for the sake of Twitter and the stream.

Yeah, I figured most of your viewers are, especially if they’re trenching or younger and in their 20s, feeling this Spartan-type vibe of, “I need to make it. I need to get to that sort of elite status where I can rest easier.”

I think a lot of people in crypto have that mindset down to a T. They know about asymmetry. They know that making $100K is not going to change their life, but they have to keep gambling that to make $5M or something like that. I think that's well ingrained, and I think it's the correct thing to do.

Really? Yeah, of course. If you have $200K and you go back down to zero, it's not a big deal, right? Worst case, you get a job. Going from zero to $200K isn't going to change what you prioritize in life that much. You're still going to have to worry about how you're going to eat.

But going from $200K to $2M, depending on where you live, you can make 4% interest—$80K a year. You're set. That's a whole new level, a threshold that you never really have to retreat from. How many times did you run it to $200K, $250K, or $500K and back to zero before you hit a breakout?

I think my story is a little unique. I was making a pretty good amount for my age after I graduated, so I had a good amount of savings. I was really early into Solana, and I was scalping Solana NFTs. I had a bot that essentially just sniped the rare ones and listed them for higher. That was back when nobody really knew how to read the Solana chain.

When I got started in crypto, I already had a decent amount of money.

How decent?

I already had $1M through my work and through crypto.

Okay.

So I started off playing defense. I never really had to play aggressive offense. I never had to run $100K into $1M and deal with those round trips. That's mentally very brutal.

It's a tough spot. So how do you play defense?

I talk about this a lot: you just need to avoid drawdowns. Mathematically speaking, if you lose 50% of your book, you have to make 100% to make it back. If you lose 25% of your book, you have to make 33% to make it back.

They call it volatility drag. Levered ETFs follow normal ETFs, but because they're 2x levered, if they lose 10% and then make 10%, they've actually lost 1%. That kind of volatility in your book is bad for your mental health, but it also mathematically increases your chance of ruin by a lot.

When you get to that $1M to $2M level, you have to switch your strategy. You can't just say, "I'm going to make the next 10x. It doesn't really matter if I blow up." That might help you get from zero to $1M or zero to $2M, but after you cross that threshold, it's not as asymmetric. You have to shift your mindset.

I've noticed that shift in mindset is the undoing of a lot of talented young traders who make it to that level and then lose it all again. Making $100K on one trade is easy, but making $1M or $2M requires a lot of good trades. It can be psychologically damaging to undo so much of that work with one decision. It's sad to see people go through it, and it's easily fixable.

I like "easily fixable." I want to ask one more question on this topic, and then we can go back to some crypto stuff. People talk about the K-shaped economy. Citrini is always tweeting, and people are always tweeting, "This is where we are. This is what's coming." Can you explain how that generally plays out? Maybe give a historical example, if you have one, or explain how you presume this is going to evolve over the next 5 to 10 years.

I have an interpretation of this that's maybe not consensus, but it's based on my own reading of history and my understanding of how I've interacted with the world.

There was always the American dream and the notion of a middle class. In my opinion, that was a one-time phenomenon after winning World War II. There was so much abundance that we were able to do all these things, elevate everyone's lives, and create all these social and welfare programs. Everyone was eating well, essentially.

I think everyone alive, especially if you're in your 20s, has parents and grandparents who have this view that this is something that can persist forever. The more I observe reality, the more I realize that it's the natural order for winners to win and losers to lose, for natural selection to take place, and for inequality to happen. That's how evolution works. That's how good trades get rewarded and bad trades get selected out of the pool.

I've realized that a K-shaped economy is actually the natural state. That's the equilibrium. If you don't do anything, that's what happens. We've attempted to fix this through different tax schemes and redistribution, and we've indebted ourselves so much through these redistributive measures to fight the K-shaped economy. We're bankrupting ourselves with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all these expenses.

We've reached a point where we know we can't do this any longer. But are we willing, as a culture and as a society, to give up the notion that everyone is still roughly the same, that we can have a strong middle class and egalitarianism? We've reached a point of cognitive dissonance that's explaining a lot of the angst, asset-price movements, and social and political movements happening right now. That's my read on why we are where we are.

At what point do we just give it up and let it go? What are the signs that they're giving it up?

Right now, the signs are that they're messing with the currency so everything looks good. The stock market is up, GDP is up, and your wages are up. But when you actually try to buy things, you're like, "Wow, I can't buy shit. I can't do anything."

Right. Yeah. They're trying to hide it right now because if people don't understand finance that well, it's hard for them to grasp. They know how much they get paid, but it takes a while for them to realize, "I can't afford things anymore."

That's how they're trying to slow things down. But people aren't just going to say, "Okay, this is how it is. I'm going to be at the bottom of the totem pole." They're going to fight for their place in society.

I think it manifests in a lot of political upheaval. The most recent trend was that the MAGA right felt like they were at the bottom of the totem pole after DEI and all this woke stuff. That's what really got them to get out and vote.

It's a counter-trend rally. The next thing will be very violent counter-trend rallies from the people who get put at the bottom of the totem pole, and that will lead to a lot of political instability.

Maybe we have an AOC- or Bernie-type regime that's very positive for asset holders, but maybe we get a regime that's very punitive toward asset holders. The key part here is to remain nimble, remain plugged in, and invalidate quickly. People who stick to a thesis, stick to their guns, and ride it to death, probabilistically, end up with nothing.

I love "counter-trend rally" because that's exactly what it was, and it was violent. It snapped back. It also feels like we're about to snap back in the other direction relatively fast.

I think it could. The function of that is asset prices. Asset prices are all Trump has to keep his coalition together. If the Ponzi collapses, people are going to defect, and there's going to be a lot of anarchy.

Yeah, you're right. It feels like it's ready to bounce off, make a little double top here, and test the bottom of the range.

Dude, a lot can change in 3 years. The election is in 3 years, and a lot can change. That's why, because things change so much, I think it's really important to stay nimble and not marry yourself to anything.

We have a little less than 3 years of Trump, and crypto sort of looks how it does. Metals just had this crazy run. Waller just got appointed. How are you positioned in the market right now? If you're mostly cash, how are you thinking about the most exciting verticals to play in over the next couple of months or couple of years?

Yeah.

I've mostly just been scalping around crypto. I was mostly focused long at the start of the month and then focused short on the latter half of last month.

On the long side, crypto's been very disappointing. Things just don't move up as much as you want them to, and they always end up round-topping. It's been very frustrating trading this thing. It's kind of lost the collective belief that it can go higher, and there's just not enough money. There's too much supply, I guess, in crypto.

I think the metals' volatility has been quite insane. It's incredibly liquid. You can just market-buy $1 billion of gold and it'll move 10 bips. Even silver is very deep. So it's very liquid, very volatile, and you're trading against tourists, essentially, right? You're trading against Chinese grandmas.

A lot of times, they form price action that you've seen before in crypto. You've seen these wicks and stuff. So I do think there's been a lot of interest in trading the volatility there, which explains a lot of the reason why HYPE has done so well, because it's kind of vampire-attacked a lot of crypto speculative flow into trading these traditional assets.

I like that you're trading against the grandmas. You—I wasn't going to jump here now, but my favorite thing I've heard you say in the last couple of weeks, I guess you said it on the Spaces, maybe in response to Frank or something, and it's the only thing I've been repeating all day: in order to have another on-chain mania, we need a large pool of unsophisticated actors with capital.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's an important thing. It's part of not being married to anything. I don't want to marry myself to only making money through trading perps, only making money through trading spot, or only making money on-chain. I think it's important to identify yourself as someone who just makes money regardless. I like to go where the money is easiest.

I think poker players understand this a lot. It doesn't really matter—you just want to play against the worst people who have the most money, right? Sometimes that'll be a game that you have a lot of tools and experience playing, but sometimes they don't want to play that game. Sometimes they want to play a different game. Are you going to wait for them to come back, or are you going to go to them, learn how to play their game, and try to beat them there?

Something I didn't account for when I got into crypto—basically in 2021, at the beginning of it, or the end of 2020—was what was happening in the crypto market. It was a very unique set of things happening at the same time. One of them was this massive pool of the most unsophisticated actors possible, with money via stimulus checks and COVID stimulus checks.

It was also a unique time when, if you wanted to be investing in the bleeding edge of tech, it was basically crypto. There weren't that many alternatives—maybe I'm naive about this. AI hadn't progressed to where it is now. OpenAI existed, but ChatGPT wasn't a thing yet. There wasn't really AI. Robotics was seen as far out.

You had this unique opportunity: a lot of really dumb people with large amounts of money and nowhere else to put it, all in the same place at the same time, where there weren't that many assets. There was Bitcoin, ETH, and then a small pool of alts. NFTs happened. Pump.fun wasn't really a thing yet. There wasn't that much fragmentation of liquidity.

What would it take to see that type of buildup again somewhere else? Is that happening in metals right now? Is it happening in AI?

I think it was happening in AI. I think you could raise a lot of money just for having no product, but it’s a game that’s hard to switch over. With crypto, it was very unique in that anyone with internet access could play it. Whereas with AI, you need good pedigree and to know the right VCs and have the right education.

I think it was also very bubbly like that as well.

I like the way you put it. A lot of these things were just the stars aligning at this point in time, leading us to a certain outcome, and it's unclear whether they'll ever align that cleanly again.

When you look back at the price chart or at history, a lot of notable historical events were one-time things. They were very lucky alignments of the stars. So maybe one way to interpret that is that we may not ever get a 2021-type regime with that amount of access and that little sophistication. Extraction wasn't as set up, so everyone could make a lot of money. It might not ever happen again, and I think it's important to be okay with that reality if it doesn't.

TraderNoah is his handle on Twitter. He made a tweet basically saying—I think it's the first time in crypto, for as long as he's been around, and definitely for me—that you sort of have to look into the abyss and accept that maybe there's Bitcoin, which I think is obviously going to win, stablecoins have already won, and perp DEXs have relatively already won, but everything else—being able to create investable assets on-chain—is in jeopardy.

It might not win. I think that it's going to, but I think it's in jeopardy for the first time. I had always looked at it as Bitcoin would just win, and then everything else would catch flows as a byproduct. I think that's largely how crypto cycles have played out. Now you look at it, and that's not exactly true.

Another thing that happened when digesting 2021 is that, because you had this god setup of the stars aligning at the same time, it really preset people's expectations for the returns you can expect on crypto assets. So when we catch focused flows on BTC, a little bit of ETH, and some of these other things in 2024 and 2025, and we don't get the traditional alt season, people get antsy and kind of lose their minds a little bit. I think we're recovering from unrealistic expectations.

Yeah, for sure. I think that's an excellent way of putting it. I think it's important to realize that this is actually very similar to the conversation we were having earlier, where we were talking about how we had this great lifestyle after World War II, and maybe that was just a one-time thing. Maybe we'll never return to that level of living ever again.

I feel like it might be the same, and it might be analogous to people looking back at 2021. If you think about it, the amount of money that was made, and how easy it was—it's not normal to make that much money. Making $1 million is very hard everywhere else. It's a very efficient game. It's not something you should expect to just happen. It takes effort and reasons for it to happen. It's not like it'll just fall into your lap again.

So I do think it's important to realize that. I guess it's a lesson in gratitude, right?

Yeah, it is. I've never heard the World War II thing before. I've never thought about it like that. I should probably do more history reading, where it's just this god setup of the stars aligning for America.

The god setup for America—it was 2021 crypto.

It was 2021 for America, and I wasn't around to trade it. You get spots like what happened in 2021 with crypto. How do you identify these setups happening, and how do you capitalize on them? You could assume that we're going to see another spot somewhere in some market. Maybe it's not crypto, maybe it's not AI, but something similar in blast radius will happen again somewhere. How do you position yourself to identify it as it's happening?

See, this is something I don't have that much experience in. I think none of us can have that much experience if we're our age, because these things happen a couple of times a decade. Maybe when you've lived for a long time, you start seeing the patterns.

A lot of it is that you have to be plugged in, and you have to keep track of what's happening and where things are going. That's number one. Number two, you have to be willing to try new games.

That part is hard because you're already good at one game. It's hard to climb down the hill and be bad at another game again. You just want to be the best at this one thing for the rest of your life. But I guess life really rewards you for being able to regress your ego, your status, and your self-perception in order to chase opportunity.

Be careful slinging around that “our age” thing. By the way, your age, maybe.

What is the path forward for others in crypto—as in on-chain internet capital markets, these on-chain assets, not necessarily meme coins, but these pseudo-equity tokens that are kind of attached to businesses? The AI developers are now clinging to this idea that you could launch your company and go public at zero on Solana, Base, or any of these chains. What is the path forward for creating investable on-chain assets, when it feels like it's the most uncertain it's probably ever been?

Yeah, that’s funny. The analogy is funny because you see it in politics a lot, where everyone says, “Remember the American dream of 2 kids, a yard, a dog, and all that?” It’s kind of the same vibe: “Remember when we could just log in, trade the new launch, CZ tweets about it, and we make $500,000? We’ve got to bring back those times.”

I think there’s something there with selling that message to people in order to organize a movement and do something about it. But yeah, it has to be a casino, right? All of crypto is a speculative asset, so the only thing that actually has self-sustaining ability—the ability to create a token and have it do well—is to create a casino that generates a lot of revenue and hype. Lighter and all these other things are examples of that.

But it’s hard to build. It’s competitive, right? You can’t just build an exchange. You need a lot of technical ability to do it. What’s the path forward for something like a Pump.fun token, or just token deploys in general?

Like Pump.fun, or the people that deploy tokens on Pump.fun?

Maybe both. I sort of meant the asset Pump.fun, but it kind of goes hand in hand, right?

Yeah. Pump at $1.5 billion is a very fair valuation. It makes a lot of revenue, but it’s unclear how many years it can sustain that for, so the multiple has to be very low by definition.

When you look at the multiples of these other online casinos, like Stake or Rainbet, the multiples are always lower than what you expect from software. That’s because these things can’t exist forever. People don’t have that much money. They don’t want to lose $50,000 a year gambling every year for the next 30 years of their life. People do it for a year or 2, and then they stop.

I think it has a floor. It may not have a huge ceiling unless things come back. But I think Pump is a fine asset. It makes a lot of money for the token deployers. The game is too solved.

Yeah. The extraction is too efficient. There will be regimes where there’s a runner again and it goes pretty high, and some people will make some money, but I think for the most part, the whole reason Pump.fun coins did well in the first place was because it was a new game that wasn’t solved yet.

Perps are so extractive, but meme coins weren’t. This was a new thing that people were willing to gamble on because they knew that someone wasn’t an expert in it. I think it has to be a new type of game that isn’t as solved and gets the retail traders.

Do you believe this idea that there will always be a new game in crypto? For crypto’s entire existence, there has always been a new game, right? You had ICOs, DeFi Summer, NFTs, meme coins, AI coins, meme coins again, and then we sort of hit a brick wall.

Yes, I think there will always be new games. It’s bad to bet against that. People want to gamble.

I like that take.

I like that you like that take, actually.

Yeah, I know you believe this take.

I do. Or I like to believe it. I like to believe it.

Yeah. I feel like a lot of trenchers are very plugged in to the new games that pop up. They’re very early to that type of thing. They’re very plugged into it. It’s honestly impressive.

I’ll move on from Solana in a second, but it’s relatively impressive how much speculative capital still exists to bid up garbage AI runners right now while Bitcoin is at $76,000, $77,000, or $78,000. It’s impressive how quickly Moltbook goes viral and tokens reach a $120 million market cap on day 1.

It’s impressive that that’s still possible. It’s like its own ecosystem. I noticed the same thing. My dad used to play a lot of Internet poker, right?

After the 2008–2009 crash, people were still playing a lot of poker. It was still lucrative to play.

Yeah. Even in a depression, people want to gamble, right? That’s why I think, to a certain extent, it’s kind of immune to Bitcoin and ETH price moves, especially since people who gamble may not even own that much Bitcoin and ETH anymore. They don’t want it. They don’t have any.

There will always be a floor for gambling, which is why I think Pump, the asset, can’t go too low—

Until there’s a new game to play. So there’s a better game.

You said this take on Spaces. This was a really good Space, by the way. There were too many bots asking questions, and some of the questions were lame, but it was a good Space. You said—I wrote it down—“Crypto has largely served its purpose.”

I think—I don’t know that for certain. That’s just one angle I have.

Can you explain what it means?

I guess I was saying that a lot of times, when I look back through history, things are just used as coordination mechanisms, and then they get discarded.

If you look at celebrities and movements, a lot of the time they burn very hot for a few years, and then society discards them. Right now, it might be Clavicular. What is the underlying emotion? Young men feel like they have no upward mobility, and they realize that maximizing their looks is a path they can use to be upwardly mobile in society.

Clavicular and a lot of these streamers are very hot, and after a few years they become irrelevant. What was his purpose? His purpose was to be an avatar to channel this ideology through.

I could see Bitcoin being like that—not for certain, but I could see it being like a Clavicular for the idea of fiat debasement. Its purpose was to serve as an alarm bell for everyone to realize that trust was being lost in these institutions. Then maybe, once people find better assets to express that view, Bitcoin becomes less relevant.

That’s just one angle I have for how Bitcoin could become irrelevant again.

That’s a sick take. I haven’t heard you say it like that. If that’s true, and Bitcoin was just an alarm bell for raising awareness of these problems, the problems don’t go away. If anything, they accelerate.

It then comes down to what vehicle you pick. I don’t know if you have a direct answer to this, but if not Bitcoin, what is the best expression of Bitcoin ideology?

I think it’s hard to say because I feel like a lot of people think they can just pack up all their wealth and leave, and that’s a lot harder in actuality.

If you could do that, why haven’t more wealthy Chinese people escaped? They’re just stuck in China. They have some offshore wealth and stuff, but for the most part, they’re stuck there. They accept this sort of loss of personal freedom and essentially accept the capital controls.

I feel like that’s probably going to happen, and you try to find assets within those constraints. We’re all just playing this game of—I don’t want to say musical chairs. Have you heard of a Schelling point?

No. Explain it to me.

A Schelling point was developed by a military strategist. If you wanted to meet someone in New York but you didn’t know when or where, where would you go, and when?

If you wanted to meet somebody in New York?

Yeah.

Okay.

You can’t communicate with them, so where would you go?

I don’t even know how to answer that.

A lot of people might say, “I’d go to Times Square at noon.”

Okay.

Right. It makes sense because it’s the most iconic thing.

Yeah. It’s the most obvious place.

Exactly. It’s the most iconic thing, and that’s what a Schelling point is. Independent actors gravitate toward something because it makes the most sense. They don’t communicate; it’s just what people tend to pick.

I think the whole name of the game is to play Schelling point. It’s just guessing where the herd is going to go and what they’re going to allocate into. I have no idea what it’s going to be. I’m not an expert forecaster. My edge relies on reading the herd, seeing 1 or 2 steps ahead of where it wants to go, and then bringing that into the future. I don’t know where it’s going to go 10 or 20 steps into the future.

The Schelling point—that is so sick. Okay, wait. So you gave this take on Spaces that kind of relates to this, and I’m going to completely botch it, so fix it for me.

The people who are on the bleeding edge of a new movement or a new asset that’s going to go parabolic don’t have the historical domain knowledge and world context to understand how big it can get, right? Peter Thiel selling all of Facebook on day 1, versus the people who have the deep domain knowledge and world expertise to understand how big these things can get, but aren’t tapped in enough to the ground floor to understand what is evolving and happening right now.

Does that make you this, or no?

I said something like that. The example is slightly flipped, but you got the idea generally right. I guess I view people as an exponential moving average of their prior experiences. People like us are very plugged into experiences.

People like us are very tapped in every day.

We're spending hours just staring at this thing. We know what changed from yesterday to today. We have the last 20 days memorized in our head, and we know what the steady state looks like. We know what could possibly happen tomorrow and what could possibly happen in 2 days.

But a lot of times, when you fit that closely to the local price movements, you lose the broader view of what your place is in the world, where this thing could go, where it's going, and what is happening everywhere else. If you're always waking up and going into one casino every day, you might not realize when a whole crowd of people might leave another casino and come to your casino and jack it up.

You might, at the first pump, sell too early because you don't realize the context: There's a huge wave of people coming over, and I'm actually very early to this thing. That’s why I think it’s important to balance being very plugged in and very micro-thinking with the big, broader picture of what's happening everywhere else in the world. When stuff does come into your house, you don't sell too early. You can actually estimate properly where it's going to go.

That's—I like the exponential moving average take. It's so good.

How's it going?

So, taking that and going back to what we talked about at the beginning, with MAGA being this counter-trend reversal and the Clavicular idea of how quickly he rose to fame, there's something I really feel. Maybe it's hard for me to judge how much of how I view the world and what I experience on a day-to-day basis is the bubble that I live in, because most people don't live the same reality that I live, right?

I'm hyper-online. I'm trading these speculative markets. My net worth is swinging. I'm on the computer way more than I'm outside. There's just a feeling that these cultural shifts, where everyone's so plugged into the internet, are whipsawing at a level that's so intense that by the time you could even digest one thing, we're onto the next.

It manifests in how these on-chain coins trade. It manifests in the news cycle. I don't know—I'll ask about the Epstein files later, maybe—but how quickly that's the zeitgeist, and then we're onto the next thing. It manifests in creators, celebrities, and streamers: how quickly someone overnight is the biggest thing in the world, and then a week later it's, "What happened to them?"

It almost makes you question what the moat of culture is. I don't even know what my question is on this topic, but have you—

I know. I like it. Yeah.

I think this is kind of depressing to me, but when it comes to internet culture and internet status, it decays very fast. You can try to quantify how much my following or my influence is worth, and you just have to view it as having 50% a year hyperinflation.

If I don't post for a year, if I'm just gone for a year, how relevant will I still be in a year? The answer is zero—very irrelevant. That's the sad nature of it, and that's just what society rewards. In the cultural game, it rewards you for being very extreme.

Yes.

You basically serve as an avatar for this giant movement, this collective thought that everyone else kind of shares, and they channel it through you as the mascot of it. Once that movement has played out, once society has evaluated what truths in this movement are worth retaining versus what isn't true, it doesn't really have any use for you anymore. That's when you fall back into irrelevance.

Which is why money and financial capital are the hardest capital. They don't decay as fast. So, for these streamers and cultural icons, the name of their game is to convert that social capital into financial capital as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It's always bad for your influence to try to make money off of it, but they try to do it as cleanly as possible. That's the meta there.

Someplace where I really felt it was this Moltbook thing, dude. Someone launches this software on Twitter, and within 24 hours, basically every single titan of the tech world is talking about this thing at the same time, all at once, all in 1 day. Elon, Sacks, all these people, Karpathy—all these people, at the same time. Instant, snap-finger hyper-J-curve, and then 3 days later, it's gone. You're probably never going to hear about it again, ever.

Startup? I haven't even followed this thing. I've never—

Do you know what it is?

Yeah. What does it look like?

It's like Reddit. It looks like Reddit. It's a Reddit clone. You sign in with your agent or whatever, and it gives you some code to run to authenticate your Claude bot or Claude Code. Then they can

autonomously post on this.

It's more like a thought experiment, I think, than anything.

Yeah.

Yeah. To your point, things move so much faster now because of the internet. There are so many events jam-packed into a short amount of time. It is crazy to see, and things just accelerate.

Things move fast. You can almost read it as clock speed. The whole clock speed of civilization has just gotten so much faster. We process things at 120 frames per second instead of 10 frames per second now.

It's a little nauseating.

I want to ask this as a follow-up, and this is a sensitive topic, so we can skip it entirely if you want. The only thing that was on my feed this weekend was the Epstein files, which were—

We're on Twitch also. They're pretty gnarly.

I'll let you navigate it how you want, but I mainly want to ask you, from the framing of what the repercussions are of civil and general-population complete distrust in the higher powers that run the country, basically seemingly all at once. Is this something that blows over? Does this have real implications?

My real question is: What's the trade? That's what I really want to know.

Does this have real societal implications?

Yeah, I think it does. I think this is an artifact of the K-shaped economy. In the 2000s, when the middle class was stronger, what did we argue over? We argued over abortion, immigration, and climate change. It was just middle-class Americans arguing against other middle-class Americans.

But now there is no middle class. It's just the underclass and then the elite. The Epstein issue strikes at the heart of this underclass resentment towards the elite. It's a unifying populist issue, right?

AOC doesn't like Epstein. The left isn't very favorable toward Jews. People like Nick Fuentes, who are starting populist movements on the right, are very America First. They don't like this sort of elitism that's going on either.

So, I do think this Epstein thing is a driving force behind unifying the MAGA right and the AOC left. 2028 might look less like traditional Democrat versus Republican, and it might look more like populism versus elitism. I think Epstein is a key driving issue.

You asked how you can make money off of this, right? There are 2 ways, in my opinion, that you can make money off of any ideology. One is to acquire social capital: You say it loudly, you say it articulately, and you get a lot of popularity for saying something that society doesn't really know how to say yet, but they feel deep down.

Yeah.

Yes. Social capital is not as interesting because, like we said—

Well, it can be.

The second way is the financial way. You put trades on this, and it's hard to think of a direct expression because you can have a completely correct idea, but if you don't get the expression right, you can make no money.

To be honest with you, I don't know yet. I'm still trying to figure that out myself. I've come to this realization that there will be—

Yeah, you were going to say something.

Well, I convinced myself it was long Bitcoin in some tied-together way on this. The idea that the system is anti-American—it's a way to make money, basically, to escape the system by any means possible. We didn't pump this weekend on this news, but it feels like a general trend. The correct vehicle is obviously the question, right?

Yeah. The tough part is that I view rich crypto traders as part of the elite, and crypto is viewed as something that I think will increasingly be viewed as anti-populist.

Yeah. Yeah. Because before, it was like, “Oh, this is a way you can make money and escape your job.”

Yeah, before it was like, “This is something for the people.” But if crypto stops making money for people, then it’s more like, “This is just a way to swindle money from everybody else.” It’s very dependent on how crypto does as an asset. Is it going to be like the S&P, where it unifies a coalition, or is it going to be something that gets sacrificed in the future? I think it could go either way, which is why I don’t think it’s the cleanest expression of this.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What else is in the running?

I haven’t really thought about it, actually.

It’s a weird one.

Yeah, I think taxes will probably be a lot higher. One argument is that people will get more UBI, and it will sort of reverse K-shaped economies. Then maybe they’ll use that to gamble in crypto.

So, like—

Dude, I kind of think the UBI thing is—

How far are we from a left candidate running on subsidizing your job if AI takes it? How close are we to that? That’s probably a topic in the 2028 elections, right?

Yeah, especially if there’s large unemployment. If it happens—which, I don’t know. People have been talking about it happening for a while. I don’t really think it has happened that severely, if at all, but it wouldn’t take much overnight for it to start happening. You’ve got to think that UBI is going to be a huge running thesis.

Yeah. I think it’s very bullish, like trenching, if that happens.

It is.

Right? Poor people buy lottery tickets. Whatever the trenching looks like in 2028, if it does happen, it’ll be a very bullish catalyst. How far in the future are you thinking when you’re formulating trades and a thesis for what you’re buying and selling? Are you thinking about 2028 on a lot of this stuff? Are you thinking about tomorrow? Where are you on the spectrum?

I like to think across large time frames, but I’ve realized that you don’t get paid for that. You get paid for thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow. You get paid for the path, for things that are going to happen soon.

You don’t want to be the guy that buys gold like Peter Schiff. Yes, he’s made a ton of money on gold, but he’s been holding gold since 2012. If you look at the gold chart, it was 8 years of doing nothing before it finally went up. If you look at his compounded growth, it was 12% a year from 2012, from gold at $1,200 to where it is now. It’s not spectacular, right? It would have been better to take his thesis, buy Bitcoin instead, and then rotate into gold and make tens of thousands of percent.

That’s why the expression honestly matters so much more than the idea. You can borrow ideas from someone, but figuring out the best way to express them is where all the money is made.

The Schiff one is an interesting dude. We did this the other day on stream: he’s been posting about gold for 19 years, bro, making daily YouTube videos about it for 12 years—Peter Schiff live, gold interview, debate—for 12 years, bro. If that’s what it takes for Bitcoin to go to $1,000,000 in 19 years, I’m not that excited. I’m not excited about that.

Yeah. Imagine if you do it and you’re wrong. Imagine how bad that feels.

This is always the thing about being a Bitcoin bull in crypto and this idea of being a contrarian. The shitty part about being a contrarian or being bleeding-edge is that you don’t really know you’re wrong until it’s zero and the ship has sailed.

I always thought this about a niche example: Jesse Pollak and Creator Coins on Base. They’re trying to do something that’s a really cool concept that nobody has ever accomplished before, so you have to respect going against the grain and trying it. But the problem with Jesse Pollak and Creator Coins is that there’s no way to know if it was correct until either it’s taken over the world and everybody has a token, or it’s zero and the world has passed you by a hundred times over and you’ve lost everything in the process. It’s a weird byproduct of playing the predictions game, you know what I mean?

Yeah, totally. This is what life wants you to do, right? Life wants you to be super convicted and do something. If you’re right, it’ll reward you with a king’s ransom. But if you’re wrong, you might just waste a lot of your life doing nothing.

A lot of it is just, “How do I—” It’s a personal decision. I admire people who have that conviction, and even if it doesn’t work out, stick with something for that long. It’s very admirable. But for me, I’m like a pirate. I just want to maximize my median outcome. I always want to come out on top, and if that means I can’t be that convicted, I can’t be the last guy on the ship to die. I’m always just going to—I just want to survive like a cockroach. That’s my mentality.

I think you have to pick one or the other. The people who pick something in the middle, where sometimes they do one and sometimes they do the other, just end up getting killed. You have to either be the max-conviction guy or a ruthless mercenary.

And don’t be anywhere—

Mercenary getting the king’s ransom. You know, it’s the Michael Saylor thing, right? They’re going to make movies about Saylor. He’s either going to be the biggest shithead in finance history or the richest guy who’s ever lived. There’s no in-between on that.

Exactly. There’s no in-between.

It’s a crazy game.

Yeah. Same with CZ. Same with Sam Bankman-Fried. These people are the lessons, the icons that teach us lessons when we look back on them. In another world, Sam Bankman-Fried owns 8% of Anthropic. FTX is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, right? If CZ didn’t shoot himself in his own foot and topple the entire industry, maybe Sam Bankman-Fried would be revealed as a genius. It’s crazy to think about how path-dependent a lot of these things are.

How much do you think about that in relation to your own success? How much are you indexing for, “I want to be revered as an icon in my domain”?

I like the question a lot. It’s kind of like, how much convexity do you want, and how much are you willing to pay for it? I have this mindset, which is very contrarian, that in crypto at least, I just want to live a good life most of the time. If that means I give up the few-percent chance that I’m a complete rock star, I think that’s totally fine.

I think that’s a shift from the aggressive mindset to the defensive mindset we were talking about earlier. But there’s no right or wrong. At the end of the day, it comes down to a personal decision. Do I want to burn bright and be great, or am I okay being all right and not taking those risks? Maybe my answer will change as I get older. Maybe I’ll get bored with life.

I’m very grateful for how my life has changed from 3, 4, 5 years ago. I guess right now I’m in a mode where I kind of just want to let that settle and not take too many risks.

I think it’s a good take. I’ll let you go in a couple of minutes. I have a couple more questions for you.

I’m happy to keep talking as long as you want to.

Okay, cool. You’re kind of flowing, dude.

I think it’s a good combo, dog.

It’s sick. It’s sick.

Horrific.

Yeah. Yeah. As it relates to your own—okay, you’re really introspective. I think more so than most people. By the way, I started doing your thing for 20 minutes this morning, just pacing around the room, walking around, talking to myself. Yeah, relatively loud, too. I was just talking to myself—no music, nothing.

That’s hilarious.

You’re very introspective. You write a lot, and I think you direct mental strain toward thinking about your situation and the world around you. How do you balance that part—thinking, basically—and executing trades? Does it get in the way of executing what’s in front of you versus what you’re trying to make of the world?

I think it can. The good part about crypto is that because it moves so fast, you don’t really need to be that concentrated. The chart just gives you so much dopamine that it’s natural to be in the flow.

But I think the issue is actually more the latter. Because the chart gives me so much dopamine, it’s hard for me to take a step back and just think. It’s hard for me to tear myself away from the screen and reflect on what’s going on. It’s so easy to tunnel vision on the micro stuff, on the feed giving you hits of dopamine all the time. It’s hard to separate. So I think that’s the main balance.

I really think that after you hit a certain net-worth milestone, it’s so important to take time off and reflect on who you are, what your goals are, and what this whole experience has revealed about yourself as a person.

And that sort of deeper thinking, I think, yields a lot of benefit, even if you give up some short-term opportunity in the markets. You know, crypto could be extrapolated from how crypto trades and from our discussion about how culture on the internet is moving so rapidly, whipsawing back and forth. At least the optimistic take is that you could be contrarian: have a long-term vision for how things are going to play out, have conviction in a trade, move slower against the grain, and outperform.

I think it feels good to hear that. People who feel overwhelmed and overstimulated by dopamine want to hear that and believe it to be true. Do you think this is true? Is the way to outperform in this 24/7 internet society to move slower?

I don’t think it’s moving slower. I think it’s two separate skills. One of them is knowing when it’s correct to be contrarian. This measures your MPC-ness [?]—how good you are at being agentic and having conviction when you know the herd is wrong, and basically defecting from the herd.

But there’s another skill. You can’t always defect from the herd, because if you don’t keep up with the herd, it’ll leave you behind. Most of the time, the herd is right, just by definition. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be there; it would die.

The second skill you need is how good you are at following the herd, because the herd is safe. If you’re away from the herd, you could get wrecked. I think the best traders are elite at both. They’re very good at figuring out where the herd is going and how to follow it, but when they see the moment to break away, they have a ton of conviction and do it with size. That’s how they make money.

If you break away at the wrong time, you could get attacked by predators or whatever. There’s no safety. You have to have both if you want to trade and do well.

I like that the herd, by default, is usually right.

Yeah.

Or else it wouldn’t exist.

Yeah, exactly. It has to be right, but it’s not always right. Defecting from the herd takes a level of autism and contrarian, psychopathic self-belief. It’s very anti-consensus. It’s almost egotistical to think, “I’m right and everybody else is wrong.”

Okay, wait. There was this Epstein clip from that interview that is so funny. Every good trader is posting this clip. I think you know what I’m talking about, where he’s talking about the market and basically saying that the best traders in the world—you could ask them what they think about the market, and they’ll give you a take. You ask them why, at any given moment, and they can’t really tell. It’s basically their balls tingle. Is Epstein talking about the best traders in the world? Do you think it’s true?

I don’t think it’s true. I think the whole arc of humanity has been explaining things that can’t be explained. I agree that decision-making can be quite hard to explain, but if you ask AI to form trade ideas for you, its reasoning is actually getting very good. I think it’ll get good enough that it will take all the easy trades and just pluck them away.

No, I don’t think that will exist forever. Eventually, people will be able to explain why they make decisions. I think eventually every part of what it means to be human will be able to be explained and deconstructed.

Whoa. That’s an insane take, kind of. What are the implications of that?

Yeah. The implications are that we’re not going to be doing this forever. It’s going to be hard to make money, and I don’t know what that looks like.

I think money will help. If you think about money, why does it exist? The whole point of money is so that you can get other people to do things for you. But if people can’t do anything that useful, and AI is doing everything, why would they need you to do anything? If they don’t need you to do anything and they have all the power, then what value does money have?

Obviously, the path to get from where we are to where that is matters. Money might matter a lot along that path, so you can’t just say, “I don’t need to make money because that destination looks like this.” But it’s not a terminal end state. You always have to be nimble. You can’t just make $100 million and go into a coma. You’re going to have to transition that money into something later, and it’s very unclear what that’s going to be.

That’s the grand game of what we’re playing. That’s the end mission.

So it sort of assumes this utopic vision of the singularity doing everything perfectly for humanity. Why would you need money with AI?

I guess I don’t know if it’s utopic, human.

I think human lives will suffer a lot, because if you don’t need someone to exist, then you tend to mistreat them. So I’m curious.

Yeah. No, it’s a fair take. I had to think about it for a second.

You can be a little rude to the girl at the bottom of your roster, you know? I’m sorry, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it’s February 13th and you don’t have a date.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Tell me. Go ahead. No, no, finish.

I wanted to ask about the take that pretty soon AI will take all the easy trades. How do you think about traders and AI tools, and how quickly that’s going to happen?

I think it’s pretty obvious to me that maybe we’re not there yet, but people are already using LLMs for their personal lives, their health, their social lives, and their relationships. Obviously, they’re going to be using them for their finances.

I think this is actually a good Alexander take. At least, he’s the first person I’ve heard articulate it: hallucination yield, which is what the LLMs think the price of an asset should be, and then the delta between what the price of the asset actually is. If everyone’s discussing with the same AI, it sort of, like, sci-fi wills this thing into existence. It’s an interesting thought, at least. What are you thinking about when you say AI will just take all the easy trades?

Yeah. I think it exacerbates the K-shaped effect, where you don’t need as many people to do as many things. Eventually, one person can do the job that 50 people can do. That’s the general trend of technology from the dawn of history.

A lot of trades that might have taken 10 of us to turn into reality, maybe one guy with really good AI tools ends up doing that, and the other nine become kind of useless. It looks less like Skynet is out there saying, “Let me buy this memecoin because this guy tweeted,” and more like the top guy builds his moat and scales so hard that the other nine guys who used to need to exist don’t have a job anymore.

That just happens across all markets. This is always happening. It’s happening in crypto as we speak. That liquidation event that happened this weekend—usually, these liquidation events are where you just mint money, right? But they happen less, and they’re less good every time, because people realize that this is a place where you can mint money. If I study these things and build tools to capitalize on them, I can get more of the gain.

It’s gotten a lot more competitive. Before, you could just be at your desk and click a few times, and suddenly you’re up a million bucks or something. You can still do that now, but it’s harder because there are more people doing this at scale. The easy fruit gets picked, and that’s one example of a trade that gets harder over time.

I like that. I want to ask you this. I think you’re a really aspirational person, all things considered. From where you are right now, what are your goals for the next—I don’t know, it could be life goals. I’m thinking more short-term, over the next 5 years. How do you think about what you want to accomplish from here?

When I first got started in the space, like everyone else, I had this number. I was operating from this scarcity mindset of, “I need to make it, and I need to hyper-gamble into elite status.”

When I hit that number, I couldn’t work with the same passion as I did before. I was like, “What the fuck is the point of all this? I’m missing out.” So I took 6 months off in New York and was just fucking around in real life, trying to do hobbies, meet with friends, meet people, and discover other games to play.

I found a few games that I liked, but I ended up realizing that this is kind of a depressing take. I’m not sure if it’s correct, but the real world just moves so slowly that I don’t get as much fulfillment from interacting with it.

I still like sports and hanging out with friends and other parts of your life, but a lot of it is just so slow and bureaucratic. It’s not like it’s different than online; it almost feels like it’s 10 years behind.

I’m just so used to this constant dopamine iteration and the evolution of ideas and information on the internet that I realize the frontier of humanity is here, right here, right now. There is no other game to play. There is no other fast-paced, higher-stakes game with smart people in the world doing other things in the real world. No, they’re all on the internet, playing games on the internet.

When I realized that, and realized that I kind of just want to have fun, be entertained, learn stuff, and seek truth, it reframed how I view what I do here every day. I still spend an unhealthy amount of time on the internet, but it’s less that I’m chasing a number and more that I’m addicted to the feedback loop of executing a successful trade, learning some new piece of information, incorporating something into my worldview, having that worldview validated as accurate, or learning new things from people I meet online. That’s mainly what’s been motivating me nowadays.

Dude, maybe it is dark, but I fully back that take because it’s hard to decipher if it’s crypto P&L, the transacting of ideas, or a little bit of both. I really feel like there’s a reason people never leave crypto Twitter, tech Twitter, teapot Twitter, whatever we want to call it. There’s a reason you hit the number, then you stay, and we kind of joke that once you come, you can never really leave.

I don’t know. At least from as much as I know, there are levels to the world. I’ve seen some levels, not all of them, but at least from the levels I’ve experienced, there’s no better place to exist as far as being bleeding-edge in what’s happening in the world. I don’t know if you agree with this, but I’ve always said crypto Twitter, which is relatively fragmented and a little bit all over the place, is the best place to spend the next 5 to 10 years on the internet and spend way too much time in.

As a proxy, you’re exposed to the bleeding edge of every adjacent industry or internet industry: everything that’s happening in AI, everything that’s happening in robotics, what’s happening in politics, even though I’m not super tapped into the political side, and everything that’s happening in internet culture. It all conforms around price action in crypto, but really it’s everything else. It feels to me that if you were to hyperfocus on one place for the next decade to, by default, be as far ahead as possible, it feels like it’s this place. I don’t know if it’s cope, survivorship bias, or—

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think this may be bigger than just crypto Twitter. I wouldn’t even call it crypto Twitter anymore. I know “internet capital markets” is kind of a loaded term, but ignoring the context behind it, just literally internet capital markets—internet trading—is the place to be. It incorporates every part of civilization, like you said. I think that’s 100% accurate. I really like it.

As a follow-up, I had this idea. I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this. I’m 24, and when I was 15 or 16, it was the earliest stage, I think, of the internet economy boom. Dropshipping went crazy, sneaker reselling went crazy, and it was the first time young kids were trading options. Robinhood’s early stage was when retail trading, at least as I knew it on the internet, really went crazy.

Everyone that’s my age is familiar with making money in weird ways on the internet. Everyone who’s 12, 14, 15, 16, or 17 now has it as the default that you make money in some weird way on the internet: the Roblox economy, Fortnite, streamers. Everyone wants to be a YouTuber. You’re familiar with basically trading internet coins.

I’m curious how you think that evolved. Are you of the belief that every new generation that follows us is going to gamble on internet assets on Twitter? Is that going to play out?

I think so, yes. I think that’s why this Zoomer-millennial cohort became so ridiculously rich: they arbitraged the fact that they were the first internet-native generation, and that coincided with internet capital markets. They were the first to crypto, dropshipping, e-commerce, and influencing, and because of that, they were disproportionately rewarded.

But now, with Gen Alpha, a lot of the easy stuff has already been plucked. These guys may not have as much opportunity in those old arenas, so to some extent there’s just less money to be made for them. But they might invent their own arenas where this is the Gen Alpha way of making money. It’s unclear what those things are going to be as they become more and more prevalent.

I don’t know when Zoomer ends, right? Zoomer starts around 1997 or 1998. Does it end around 2007 or 2008?

The Zoomer age range is up to 29, so 2012.

2012, so they’re 14 right now. When these guys turn 20, they might have their own game to play that makes the money that we have. We’re kind of—who knows? But I think being tapped into what that game evolves into is very profitable.

It’s fascinating to see. You have more experience trading markets than I do, and a lot of people probably have way more experience than both of us. It’s interesting to see that “internet capital markets” is a pretty applicable term for all of it, because you see all of these things becoming one.

You directly see it on Hyperliquid, but there are metals, stocks, crypto, and everything else. You could imagine whatever that next Gen Alpha game is, however big it gets, it’s all just merging into whatever you call what we do every day.

That’s why I think bull market, bear market, Bitcoin at $100,000, below $100,000, $50,000—whatever—it doesn’t matter. You kind of just stay here because whatever happens next, you win or get exposure to it as a proxy for existing. That’s why I think the downfall of crypto Twitter is really overstated.

Yeah, go ahead. I wouldn’t call it that. I guess a lot of crypto stuff has been deprioritized by the algorithm, but I think the algorithm is telling us that we need to move on to something more universal and more interesting. There may be a year or two where there’s nothing apparent or consensus, but I do agree that if you stay plugged in and active, you will get rewarded for it. This is the place to be, right? This is where ideas evolve. This is where everything happens. This is the center of evolution.

I always think that if I were to go down a street in New York right now and ask 100 people if they know what Claude Code is, I’d imagine maybe one person has used Claude Code. I ran into an engineer—five people at most. So, yeah, I 100% agree.

Okay, I’m asking this sign-off, by the way. This is sick. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go or what direction we’d take it. This is honestly really fun. I wasn’t sure either, because I had just hung out with you, so I was wondering if I was going to cover the same stuff. I don’t know.

I think it’s better that we hung out, because we can stew on the ideas more. You’re a very philosophical guy. You’re a thinker.

Well, I had to tap into your mindset, bro. I had to read some stuff.

Even naturally, dude. I know you’re a thinker. You’re an introspective guy.

Thanks, man. I know you are.

My sign-off question is double-headed advice. One part is for the majority of my general age demographic, which skews younger and aspirational. We’re growing up in a weird time, markets are weird, and we’re trying to make it by any means necessary. How do you play this game and ensure your success?

The second part, which I can ask you afterward, is selfishly where you think all of this financial entertainment goes and how I play it. But go with the first one first.

The first one is hard to give advice on because, by definition, everyone can’t make it. This is mainly speaking to people who are capital-poor but talent-rich, and it’s even hard to give advice to them because I almost feel like if they’re talented, it’s just going to work out for them no matter what they do.

But for me, when I look back at my first 6 months, when I quit my job and was doing this full-time, I was barely making money. I wasn’t making the money that I knew I needed to make in order to justify doing this full-time.

And it was very stressful and existential. I would get so frustrated with myself, and I just wouldn’t be sure if I was doing the right thing or not. To be honest with you, it only gets resolved in one way: if it works out, then you did the right thing.

For me, it manifested as this relentless, burn-the-bridge-behind-you mentality. I just cannot give up because there’s nothing to go back to. I’m stuck here. It has to work out.

That mentality led me to doing 16- to 18-hour days, relentlessly, and not taking any vacation. Maybe it was bad for me not to keep up with a lot of my social interactions, but a lot of the time, I just had to do what was required to win.

When I look back at that period, I’m very grateful that I did that and was able to compound myself into a repeatable edge and find a moat for what I do. I do think a lot of people can really change their lives if they just lock in for 6 months and that’s all they do.

You could do that with working out and get insanely jacked in 6 months if that’s all you focused on. If you just grinded one hobby for 6 months relentlessly, you could probably be in the top 1%, or top 0.1%, in the world. I think that general advice just applies here.

That’s a sick take. Think about doing that with ping-pong. But no, seriously, it’s a sick take.

Absolutely.

Okay. Then selfishly, for me, but also for the genre of financial entertainment, if you will, which is relatively underexplored, I think: we always joke about who’s the next-generation Jim Cramer. It’s relatively unexplored, whereas other content niches have gone parabolic over the last decade.

How do you see this evolving? Its importance in the world? Do we need to pivot? Whatever?

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit over dinner. I think a lot of times, not all views are created equal. Getting some random dude in some third-world country versus getting a capital-rich, well-educated crypto person who is talented—one of them is worth a lot more than the other.

I notice you talk a lot from the frame of trenches and people in Solana, and that is a good base, but I do think it can be expanded. Especially if trenching doesn’t come back for a while, there are still a lot of other capital-rich, plugged-in, intelligent bases to appeal to.

I guess it’s just figuring out what kind of content they want to see while still making it entertaining for the people who have watched you for a long time. That’s what I would probably go towards if I were in your situation, which I’ve been considering. Maybe streaming, too.

I think you have a much better personality for it, and you have a team and everything set up. You’ve done this for a long time.

You have an ethical and moral responsibility, Thiccy.

I might just hop on your stream every now and then.

Just come once a week or once a month. Fuck it. We’ll just rip it and dump everything out here first.

Dude, this was sick, man. It was the longest one I’ve done in a while. Thank you for coming on. I think we covered a lot of important stuff, and I wanted to use today to reset a little bit, cleanse the mind, and take a step back after a year of carnage—but especially after a brutal weekend—and give people a different perspective, maybe a flat reset on how to think about some things.

I think you called me the thinker, but you invented the thinking thing. Thank you for your time, dude. I appreciate you coming on, and I’m hopefully going to see you soon. Hopefully, we can do another one.

Yeah, sick. Good time. Take care.

Have a good one, man.