E136: Selini Capital Founder: How to Actually Build Wealth in a New Economy (Crypto > Stocks)

28:25I think that's the mistake. Increasingly, most people will become NPCs in this world where they're not economically productive. I think you should be striving to be one of the economically productive people. There's not going to be a huge percentage of the population, but there will be more than I think is assumed. I think, you know, there's a desire for me certainly to like not be an NPC. And I think a lot of other, you know, young people as well don't want to just become a cog in somebody else's machine. and sort of just get this UBI subsistence. Even if all your, you know, what's the main thing?

29:11Like people want, first of all, like the hierarchy of needs, you want your needs met. You don't want to be able to have food and survive. Okay. And then they care about like status games and different, you know, dynamics. They want to be able to find a mate and have, you know, different levels. I think, yes, like nobody should be forced to keep working on something forever that they don't like working on and they just have to do it because they need money and they need to survive. I think we're going to get to that post-scarcity within 10 years or so, for sure. But what is the retirement mindset?

29:50It's like, I want to chill. Okay, you want to chill. If you chill, you certainly don't even need 10 million. I think you need enough to

30:04just wait out the next like five, 10 years. And then, you know, the difference between having 100K and having like 10 million over the next 10 years is not going to be that much. So to answer your question. Can you just explain that? The difference between having 100K or 10 million over the next 10 years is not going to be that much. Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's a bifurcation happening between economically productive and economically non-productive people. And you should just be striving to be economically productive because the amount of wealth that's going to be created over the next 10, 20 years is so much more than what's being created in all of history put together, especially in notional fiat terms.

30:46In real terms as well, because if you think about it as the industrial revolution is happening and it's compressed, this is what Demis Hassabis says from DeepMind. He says, take 100 years, but it's happening in 10 years and it's happening 10 times bigger. So it's 100X. And then, you know, crypto people like 100Xs. This is literally like 100X moment where the amount of like new wealth and new things that matter is going to be 100X the rate that it has been over the last, you know, our parents' generation. So if your plan is to like retire and chill, it doesn't really matter. As long as you get through like the next few years, this hundred X of generation that's going to happen in society is going to be making your a hundred K to like, you know, 10 million, not, not super relevant.

31:39Um, and if you have, if you're like an old, you know, you have these like families, the one good thing is like these, these like really old money families that just, you know, the great grandfather managed to do some shipping thing or some, whatever was the, the mining thing of his generation and built some brand. And then like the grandchildren now are just like living off of this. You have a lot of this in Europe. They all leave their money in Swiss banks and actually like hundreds of millions in cash, like sitting there in actual cash. I have a bunch of friends who work for these banks and they're like, man, I'm trying to tell these people they should at least invest in S &P or gold or whatever.

32:17Like, no, I want my money, my$800 million in cash. Yeah. So those people, the way I say it's good, it's like, it's a little bit of an equalizer of society because those people are going to get diluted incredibly hard in terms of like what their wealth that they've inherited does. If you look at the Middle East, they've been remarkably like smart around taking what's like old money, like all this oil money from, you know, the 70s, 80s and using it to invest in like new technology. So they've kind of realized that the form of money that they've had, which is oil, transforming it into shares of open AI, transforming it into like, you know, chips and NVIDIA.

33:00So they've done a good job. The Europeans probably have not. and this like 100x that's coming of creation of potential means that what really matters like how society is going to value you. You know, you remember this like scene from the big short where the guy's like, well, I'm, you know, I'm doing these mortgages, I'm getting paid this much. How much does society value you? Because this dollar amount that I'm getting means that society really fucking cares about what I'm doing right now. Of course, that changed very quickly, like in a couple of years back then. But this concept of like, are you valuable to society?

33:41It's a much bigger question than$10 million to retire. And I understand that, you know, I'm saying it as somebody who was like, you know, far past thinking about this kind of stuff. But maybe that gives me like a clearer view of, yeah, as long as you don't have to like go and like, you know, work a long shift at McDonald's every day. because that sort of like doesn't help you with preparing for being valuable to society in the future. But the right question is really like, how do I make sure that I'm valuable to society? If I am, then that changes everything. That's like so much more important than having a certain amount of cigarettes, right?

34:25And secondly, like, look, I'm not just saying think, just improve yourself. if you want to have a lot of cigarettes now because while we're getting out of prison there's a period if you're smart and you have a lot of cigarettes you'll find people who still take the cigarettes and maybe you can change the cigarettes for a car or whatever is going to be needed on the outside and make the switch because people are still thinking about cigarettes so get the cigarettes you can still do a lot of stuff with them which is why I'm still playing both games at the same time so the real game if I understand well is basically a hurdle rate game with your skills and the cigarettes or wherever you need to understand what environment you're in are you in the prison with the cigarettes are you outside and there's something else that matters are you in this kind of transition which is where we kind of are now so you need to be aware of that and then you need to be aware of this hurdle rate which is the most important thing.

35:32Am I getting diluted or not based on the income I make, the skills I acquire, and the investment I make? Where do I store the money or the cigarettes or whatever else I create? Where do I store it so at least I don't get beaten by this hurdle rate? Sure, let's dig into that one because I understand I'm talking a little bit first principles and, you know, we'll talk about property rights and why property rights matter. And, you know, why we shouldn't just think about this abstraction of dollars and a hundred dollars and 20,$20 and whatever it is. But for a second, let's get into, into like that game.

36:14So yes, like if you're assuming that you want to play the cigarettes game as well, because for now we're in the prison and we'll be able to take the cigarettes and quickly switch them for something as the time appears. And we'll be, we'll, you know, do that, do that switch. Okay. Let's play a cigarettes game. Yeah. If you have, if you're sitting on a lot of cash and you're, you're not, you're being passive on it, as you said, like three years, you're down 40%, you know, with like real purchasing power. so what are the actual assets that generate returns so you have stocks I think for now stocks are the most universally owned it's a good Ponzi in the sense of like in the US the government will keep juicing stocks so you know stocks are volatile but if you have downside volatility and we saw this over COVID where it says you went from like 3300 to like 70, like down by a half in like a month.

37:22Because of like the society structure where everyone wants it to go up, they'll make it go up. The government will make it go up. They're politically, you know, destined to do whatever it takes to make that number go up because this is kind of like going to create the least dissatisfaction politically and in society. So it's a good Ponzi in that sense. It's like they'll just print money. They'll do whatever it takes. So it's not a bad thing to own stocks. Now, what does it mean? I mean, look, this S &P 500 concept is okay. There's a lot of danger of just having these passive flows because a lot of these companies that happen to be in there, they just keep getting automatic investment from, you know, all these mutual funds, all these ETFs, they just automatically go in.

38:14And then you just have the underlying fundamentals. A lot of these companies are not good. And so when they get re-rated, when their earnings don't really come out as strong, you're actually losing money by having invested in a lot of suboptimal companies because you're sort of putting into this index. So index investing done at scale, where everyone's just putting into the index, is, you know, it increases the amount of waste that happens in there. So it's not a very clean way to invest when everyone's doing the same thing. But look, it's okay. Most people don't have time to figure anything else out.

38:56It's simple enough that the average guy can just put in the S &P 500 and that's fine. It's better than nothing. And for my normally friends who are too scared of crypto and have to kind of slowly put them in, And I tell them, yeah, at least put 50 % in just broad stocks, maybe international stocks, indexes, and there's a few ETFs, basically. And at least you're not getting diluted as hard as just leaving it in your account. That's fine. It's something. Just one remark, because you said, that's basically the key question today, right? What should you be investing in to not be beaten by this hurdle rate?

39:38So just as you mentioned stocks and S &P 500, actually it's a conversation I had multiple times with Raul Powell, who says S &P 500, 12 % annualized. So basically you're flat or even a bit down versus 15 % you talked about, right? So basically you make no money, right? The second one is NASDAQ, 17 % annualized, more or less. So we make - No, it's not 17, that's bullshit. It's just higher volatility. And we've happened to have a period where growth has outperformed. But I don't think that there's any way in hell that a serious person thinks that like 17 % annualized on like a passive index like the NASDAQ is going to keep recurring.

40:18Like it's, yes, like, sure, we're in a tech society, but it doesn't mean that like NASDAQ will keep running at 17%. So you're saying it's going to be less and therefore it's also not going to beat. When it goes down, it's going to go down and so hard that, you know, you've had some years of 17. I mean, the corrections on the NASDAQ, think about it more as like a volatile altcoin. It'll have some large corrections. So yeah, I'm saying it's less.

40:51But go ahead. So everything else, we talk about S &P, NASDAQ, you're saying it's even less, right? Everything else is down. is lower than the hurdle rate. There's no real returns on these things. You're just sort of trying to keep up with the sort of like the fiat displacement because the earnings will, you know, if they're productive companies, and I said, there's going to be like some bad companies in these indexes that are just like zombie companies getting money and misallocating resources. But broadly what you're doing is just, you're keeping up with like the earnings, which are in essence representation of like the debasement that's happening on the currency.

41:33On a real basis, you're sort of treading water. Same as you're owning treasury-inflated tips, whatever, these kind of bonds. You're underwater because the way that they're measuring it is not even real. So all of these ways are not generating you real wealth. To get real wealth, you have to go where the puck is going. And we'll talk about some of those options, yeah. Let's talk about it now. Where is the bug going? Crypto is, I would say, the cleanest representation of that. And then the second, which is stronger but harder to get into, is going to be investing in these emergent technologies. For example?

42:23On the emergent technologies. Yeah, I've been talking to the people that are seeing where the technology is going. And you can imagine a concept of like a post-AGI Berkshire Hathaway or like a collection of companies that doesn't matter right now. But in like five to 10 years, this is what's going to matter. You're obviously seeing a lot of these smart people investing in things like human enhancement, everything from like Neuralink to like, you know, Sam Alman just made a competitor to that. and then I've done some private investments in companies that are working on human augmentation because we're going to have to keep up with smarter machines to be relevant and not be NPCs and so we will have to get the best version of ourselves and that might mean hopefully not putting chips but there's work on how to increase your IQ through other means neurons, different things that can be done.

43:23Industries like this clearly are going to be important. not important yet because technology's not there. Some people like robotics. I think the robotics angle I've dabbled some investments in, I think it will matter. It will obviously come into play and it's a bit early to tell exactly how. I think the energy sector, there's a lot of belief around solar will matter a lot. So what does that mean? Maybe you need to buy a lot of land where there's a lot of sun, but also there's good property rights. So I keep mentioning property rights. Let's talk about property rights just as a side, because it's certainly something that's in my head all the time and everyone should be.

44:16If society is going to go through this period of unsettlement now, as economically everything is shifting, we can't just assume that

44:28you having a piece of paper that says that you own something will be respected. And this is not like cuckoo talk. I mean, we've seen even in a few decades ago the US government was seizing gold, saying gold has to be given to the government. You can't, you know, there is also examples in the UK where if you have a mansion, suddenly like they want to tax you super aggressively for having like a mansion tax. Like why do you have an expensive house in the UK? We're going to decide that, you know, you have to pay a huge levy on it. In the US, the Democrats keep talking about they want to do like a wealth tax.

45:12So like they just want to find whatever they can generate your wealth and tax you on it. these things interfere with property rights as we know them, where right now we're used to in Western society, maybe not in China. Maybe they also have weird property rights because the state is much more involved. But actually that's a good example. So you can see worlds where you owning something, you know, it's like the big guy picking you up and it's like, oh shit, like, you know, he actually has control over what I own something. Property rights are going to be more and more of a thing as society is more imbalanced and there's a social turmoil that's coming where the inequality is going to cause a lot of like political discontent, which will, you know, people be like, oh, these rich people have too much because the haves and have-nots are separating.

46:00There's a lot of have-nots, more and more NPCs, few like some Altman's in the world and Elon Musk's. They're going to want to be like, let's take their stuff and redistribute it. This is age old stuff, right? You know, we're talking about like French revolution, guillotine, like this has happened in history. What is going to be the new version, which is inevitably coming? I think this is where, for example, the difference between having physical gold versus having a digital gold, which is stored somewhere and it's, you know, nobody can sort of seize it that easily. If you're smart about it, let's say those types of things matter.

46:38If you have real estate, like land, in a regime, in a country that's unstable, and it's not going to respect the fact that you paid something for it. You know, it's like when the Native Americans, they had their property rights. And then, you know, the conquistadors arrived and just decided that your way of knowing who owns what doesn't matter. We're going to re-decide. So, you know, buying all the land in like sub-Saharan Africa because it has good solar power potential might not necessarily be the play. You have to think like where proper rights are going to be respected. So very stable places like Singapore, for example, certainly like will have a better chance.

47:20And so those places are going to be very attractive and have a huge premium because of the respect for the property rights there. I think Balaji tweeted the other day. I mean, I'm not sure it was not only about property rights, right? But he was basically saying, given all the changes that are going to happen in the next five to 10 years, what are the places where I, so he would feel comfortable staying, Singapore, Dubai, El Salvador. And he said maybe more and more India, but basically he said very, very stable governments. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which is why I think, unfortunately, some of these Western governments that have given us so much in terms of culture, like the US and UK, these governments are, the fact that they're so unstable inherently due to a lot of political forces that are very unsettled in those countries is, look, it's nice to go there.

48:22like I go to San Francisco, there's a lot of creative construction going on because it's just, you know, there's a lot of activity. But in terms of, yeah, being able to plan and knowing that property rights are going to be respected by the next government, which might be a very socialist, you know, once we go from crime season to, you know, steal your wealth season, like hide your money kind of season, whatever is going to be coming in like five years, then these things will come into play. So you think still your wealth season is coming in the next five years? Look, there's going to be such a huge backlash between the haves and have-nots because we'll get to the hack that, look, just tie it all together.

49:08Investing in crypto, specifically mainly Bitcoin, which is a very safe one, but then also being able to potentially find accelerants in some of the other cryptos if you're like so deep in the space, you can understand, you know, what's happening with the other ones. If not, then just buy Bitcoin. It's like a nice proxy. It's such a hack that I've taken advantage of and others have to concentrate your bets on crypto because, and like I said, I don't own stocks. Like I just have crypto basically like riding this wave because this concept of like having 2 % or 5 % in crypto, if you think about why you should have that 2 % and then you realize like, actually like you should just like have as much as you can without getting any risk of, you know, having to sell.

50:01You don't want to be in a position where you're a forced seller. But going to that limit has made sense for the last few years. And I think will continue to make sense for the next few years as well. it's such a hack because the rate of growth of crypto has multiple things going for it. One, you have the same, let's say like fiat protection as you have in stocks, because the denominator is automatically inflating you. Bitcoin slash USD, you still get like the the same protection from, from the limited supply versus like the growing supply. So that's, that's one thing that's good. Secondly, the asset class itself is becoming more attractive to more and more people.

50:49And as it's like the dominoes falling, I talked to like the sovereign wealth funds and they're like, Oh yeah. Like, you know, two years ago, they'd be like, we're not gonna buy crypto. We're just going to buy gold. Why don't you buy Bitcoin, digital gold? it's too small. So like we can't put, you know, a hundred billion dollars into it. It's too small. Which is a really weird thinking because normally you want to buy early. You want to buy when it's cheap. So it's not that they completely disregard it. They're just saying it doesn't fit. It's too small. Okay. We have too much money. We have too much of this fiat and then we can't fit into this instrument.

51:24Well, now that the instrument's getting bigger, it actually makes them come in because they're like, oh, well now we can put a hundred billion dollars into it. And it makes because it's like a 2 trillion asset. So we can own 5%. And you see like that when it gets to 10 trillion, it sort of continues from there. I'm not saying it's going to go on forever, but yes, like there's a little bit of a banana zone kind of situation over like years. I want to say, how big is the banana? How many years does the banana span over? For crypto specifically. I think it's until like you get the saturation from the real money, all the real money comes in.

51:59So you're starting to obviously get some Wall Street money, ETFs, you're getting a bit of sovereign wealth money. We're seeing Mubadala, or the Middle East was, the Emirates were starting to allocate to Ibit. I haven't heard of GIC buying yet. Norwegians are dabbling in a couple of things, but the last big X, which is coming, the multi-X, is from this last fiat segment finally sort of bowing down and being like, okay, all right, we have to allocate, like this is a big thing now and we have to come in. Obviously there's the Game Theory of the Nation States sort of looking at it and wanting to be a little bit early because it is like a relative, it's a PVP thing.

52:49Like the earlier you get in, you're sort of getting more coins. So I think conservatively, on a fiat basis, you have like a 5 to 10x pretty comfortably over the next five years. So on Bitcoin, mainly Bitcoin. I mean, we can talk about the other cryptos and get into it. Bitcoin is a macro asset and I think it's going to be far, far cleaner and simpler and a much better form of money. I don't think any of the others are a form of money that makes sense right now. Now, Bitcoin has flaws. I'm not a Bitcoin maxi. I realize that over a longer time span than five, 10 years, some of those flaws will become apparent and society will not necessarily...

53:43It might be the next cigarettes. Like right now, the fiat's a cigarettes, then the Bitcoin is going to be a cigarettes. There's going to be a next cigarettes. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what that looks like because the people that can get ahead of it and from first principles kind of put together what better money looks like are going to be the ones that, like I said, this 100x of wealth creation that's about to happen in society, it's going to need good money. It's going to need better money. The better the money, the more coordination, the more resources are aligned correctly. And if you just see this, if you want to do well for yourself, figuring that out is going to have a huge impact.

54:24That's why there is no retirement. You can't just stop thinking. You can't just be like, oh, I have a packet of cigarettes. I have 10 packets of cigarettes. I have 100 packets, and now I'm good. I'm just going to change them for stuff. At some point, you won't be able to change them for the stuff that you want. So look, I think Bitcoin is a very clean bet for the next five years as society realizes that this is a good form of money. And they are clearly coming in and they're realizing it. Now you have these little altcoin mini cycles, which I call them more like liquidity cycles, where, you know, people start speculating.

55:08Why do they speculate? I think it's a range of things that happens. One is like, if you play the game well, it is like a little, it's a little opportunity where you can get a, get like, you know, five years wealth construction done in like, you know, two months or five months. There's a chance of that. And some people are attracted to this fast, let me just quickly get up to speed because I'm behind. So instead of just holding Bitcoin and everybody else, let me dabble in all this speculation. And if I exit at the right time, then it's like the age old gamble in the altcoins and then maybe put it back into a harder money afterwards to kind of hold it.

55:56So you have multiple layers of this. I mean, you know, this like meme coin cycle that we've had that's defined last year, if you talk to the trenchers, for them, you know, soul might be their currency to like gamble. So they go into soul, they trade all these shit coins, like these tiny meme coins, and they try to buy up and down. And then that's like their poker chips in the casino. And then when they cashed them out, they called stabling. It's time to stable now. Stable is when you get out of the matrix and you take out the salon and you put it into USDC. Because this is like a more stable currency.

56:38I'm not saying like, you know, that's how everybody should be thinking about their lives. But you can just see that there's this concept of, okay, speculation period. Let's try to increase our base asset by going to the casino and putting all the chips everywhere. and then hopefully we can cash out and stable. We have to talk a bit about that and then we'll get back to the other subjects because you're talking about this now. The hyper gambling trend, which is probably going to get bigger and bigger because it's like a convergence of everything. You look at content we consume, content that is being created, all these platforms are all moving towards this, all this financialization of everything.

57:22everyone's becoming a trader. That's great. Everyone has a chance, right? That's the dream that we're being sold. But what's the actual truth? The actual truth, because here we're talking about serious shit, which is where is the puck going and how do you not fuck up this mega trend that's coming? Because you could follow the puck, but still do all the wrong shit and not benefit from it. And I think that's what the majority of people do in this industry. They've been in crypto for many years, but they're still struggling. It's so hard not to make mistakes that are big, big, big kind of mistakes.

58:01I mean, even some of the people that mined all the Bitcoin and then Bitcoin Cash came out and some of them thought it was a great idea. They switched all their Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash and then we've kind of seen what happened. There's like a thousand X difference on those. So it's difficult to play these speculation games unless you're top of the game. It's PVP, right? Like these are all zero-sum games. They're negative-sum games actually because there's a lot of this money that goes to like the third parties that are just providing the casino game. So, you know, there's like lawyers taking fees and operators and tax attorneys and everyone's like taking their fees.

58:47And so you get to play in the casino, but you're paying all the overhead for it. And if you're an incredibly good, you know, poker player and you have your edge, you know, I've done this. I have used my skills to get into these casinos. And, you know, even when I talked about Luna or Ohm or like all these different kind of casino games that have happened in crypto. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll look at it. I'll be like, okay, this is not, this is going to collapse, but I can still get in there and, you know, maybe write it up and write it down because I understand it so well. And so like that knowledge, that judgment, I'm not a purist that says like, okay, I'm staying out of this stuff because this is all not sustainable.

59:32At my sophistication level, you just get in there and you take advantage of the fact that you understand the game. And I can still be like publicly trying to save everybody and be like, you know, we shouldn't, this is like a bubble. We shouldn't like be growing this further. But since I understand exactly when the bubble will pop, I might as well sort of, you know, write it. So I'm a little bit of like, you know, there's like Naval I'm like Naval, but like the nicotine version. I'm not like the calm version. I'm like more of like, you know, I'm not going to just talk about the concept. I'll get in there and take advantage of my knowledge because that's the game that exists and I'm not going to be a purist to stay out.

1:00:16You said that most people in crypto claim that they want to make money, but their actions just show that they want dopamine. are launch pads meme coins the whole hyper hyper gambling meta just a societal mirror or a dead end look a lot of the the people that are you know participating in these things like um one you know they get into these like addictive swingy habits I've been um thinking about this this summer you know I take my annual pilgrimage and I go to Vegas. That's my kind of holy place. And I play the World Series of Poker. I compete in this stuff. And every year, like, you know, I look around and reflect on how I've changed because it's something I've done consistently for so many years that I can compare Jordi from the previous year to the previous year.

1:01:12And I see, for example, this year, it was a year where like, looking around at people playing like these table games and they play blackjack and background and all this stuff. And they're so into it. Some of them are wealthy. Some of them are like not wealthy, but they, you know, they want to gamble. And I had no urge at all to play any of these games. Like I, I wasn't like even remotely interested to go and sit at a blackjack table and see what happens. And the reason is because like, no matter what happens, it's not going to change my life. And I think that like small chance of people feeling like, oh, this might be the day that I go to the craps table and, you know, it'll, it'll be like a hundred rolls without a seven and I'll be able to upgrade my life in such a...

1:01:55Having that hope creates the addiction and that hook where it pulls you in. And a lot of people feel like they're very drawn to that chance. Like people buy lottery tickets and there is a utility to the lottery ticket, which is not just having to do with the money. it's just there's the period between when you buy the lottery ticket and when the numbers come out forget the stuff later where like you make money or don't make money but there's a utility in this in-between period where it was like it's giving you hope it's giving you like this imagination of like oh what if i win like that's the that's the hook and you know even like a week ago i was seeing on twitter this like massively viral video where the guy is like telling his son that they just won the lottery millionaire and like they start hugging and everyone's like the feel, the feel like the shoe, they, they, they love seeing this because you can, you can feel like the, the shoe emotion of like, oh, you know, we're, we're, we're going from like our situation.

1:03:06We've leveled up now. And that, uh, that dream and that, that, that hope makes a lot of dopamine. It gets a lot of people addicted, gets a lot of people like hooked on, on, on this like concept. But especially in a society where you don't, you feel like you have no other way to level up than to gamble. You know, the Korean society has had this for a long time. Now we're starting to see this Koreanization in other societies. It's something that I've been observing as like a psychologist mindset, because it's so, it's so extreme. Like sometimes it looks like these people have like a financial death wish.

1:03:40Like they're not even trying to play the game well. They just want to just aggressively go for it. And it's not that they're, I think they just want this hope and this dream to, like they want to feel that rather than systematically like achieving the outcome. And this is a trend that is growing. I mean, yeah, it's hyper growth, hyper liquid. I mean, these kinds of like platforms, you can see how much they're growing. it's like it's like this public casino where you can go and see everyone getting on the leaderboard and making money losing money, you have these James Wynn characters losing 100 million and this drives so much attention and participation and it's so weird because we're desperately in crypto looking for these use cases and which are these companies that actually make a lot of money but these companies that make a lot of money are the ones that basically participate in 99.9 % of people's financial death wish.

1:04:46Yeah. Which if you think about the whole game we talked about before, which is where's the puck going? It makes no sense. I think the one thing that we have to quickly go into is the sense of the difference between individuals and society. And so like a lot of the behavior that we do has two levels. And I think about this all the time. There is, you know, Jordi, Kevin, as individuals, they're acting in their own interest. But then there is like all of humanity together. And so what is, you know, Taleb talks about this in his book of like fragility, anti-fragility. He'll say that as individuals, we die, you know, we live and we procreate.

1:05:30The next generation comes. We're fragile. but the fact that we kind of do this like self made selection and like genetic selection is anti-fragile for humanity as a whole. So we're always living on two levels. There is us as like participants individually, and there's us as like part of the collective humanity. So on a, on a individual level, the fact that like we're expendable, um, especially men, you know, men are expendable because you don't even need that many men. Right. We've talked about this in our We're back to how men are expendable. We're back to that. It's a fundamental principle here.

1:06:11It's true. It's true on the society level, not on the individual level. Obviously, I don't want to be expendable for me, but on a society level, most people are expendable. And so this hyper-gambling, let's say where there's a filter and it's like Russian roulette, where 100 people go in and like one person merges with like all the 100 wealth of everybody put together and everyone else sort of like just becomes irrelevant. This kind of filter, as like most people become NPCs, for society as a whole, it's probably like the natural state where you have less people, but they have more and like they're kind of bigger.

1:06:54So like as a society, the fact that we're going towards it's this hyper gambling pervasiveness. Assuming that like, let's say like all these PVP games, you know, a million people go in and it generates like a hundred winners of this game. And hopefully like there's not just luck, like there's some skill selection so that the people who come out of this are like not totally random, but like they're like able to be productive with what they've gotten. maybe that for society as a whole, that's good. But as an individual, you're looking at it and you're like, this guy is clearly on like just a complete like wish without doing any, any, any smart things.

1:07:40And some of them, you know, at least for some time they can, they can, they can like ride a high. So having this concept of both levels as the individual in society, when you break it up, you realize that society as a whole probably is encouraging this like, uh, hyper gambling in many ways. I didn't want a two to four X. So I choose the minus 99 % instead.

1:08:14Look like take, like if you're going to go like the slow and steady route, um, which is the route that I've taken, you can still, if you're very good and you stay on top of your game, every three, four years, you can still 10X.

1:08:31And that will definitely beat, at least without anything changing, whatever, like this 15 % dilution. Because I think once you get more than 15%, that's what happened after COVID, where there was such a backlash, like, okay, prices are going up, the government does need to do something, and they raise the rates. And so I think after the 15%, they do intervene and they'll do some kind of austerity something to slow it down. Below 15%, they just like keep printing. So you end up at this like middle range, 15%. If you 10X every three, four years, which is the mindset that I've had and I've done it several times now, I think if you do that, that's a good enough pace and you don't need to like keep resetting by like going down 99%.

1:09:24i'm trying to be credible here and try to do the thing that makes sense even in this industry where most of the i would say media and people just love the ah this is how you turn a thousand dollar into ten million dollar or a million dollar right because it gets the clicks it's actually it's actually the business of the media yeah so the creators they're all incentivized to do that because that's how they make money, because that's how they get the views. And all the people, they just want to read this shit and click on this shit, right? Yeah. But the truth is, that's what we're trying to do here.

1:09:58It's a bit more boring, but it's the truth. Crypto is a get-rich-slow scheme and a get-wrecked-quick scheme. How do we make people understand this? Especially the new dopamine-addicted generation that loves to watch degenerate live streams and gamble on meme coin or shit coin at the same time. and even take pride of getting wrecked. Look, to your first point, I think, because I'm a little bit in this creator game as well, I understand that you have to at least get the tension and have the splashy headline or that quick attention grabber. Because if you don't do that, you don't even get the view.

1:10:35So it doesn't matter how deep you go. You're not even in the game. So you have to play this game. That's fine. I do find it cringe when people make these... you know, dollar predictions, Bitcoin to a million dollars. Like, okay, maybe, but what, what does a dollar mean in that world where you're like, what year are you talking about? Like they say, like in 2040, Bitcoin is going to be, you know, Saylor does this a lot, whatever some amount. And it's like, you have no clue, like what dollars are going to mean in 2040. Like how many, what's going to be the denominator? Like, it's just like random facts, but it grabs, it grabs that, like, it grabs the click.

1:11:14Like, so look, we play that game. That's fine. Cause you first need to get through the door and then, you know, don't be so cringe, hopefully. I think it's okay to take small risks that might have an outsized outcome and get you rich quick. So let's say like, you know, a few percent, you sort of do like very high risk things on and take moonshots and that's totally fine. It gives you both the psychological satisfaction of that hope that we said, like between when you buy the lottery ticket and you see what happens. So it satisfies that need. So yes, take some percent and do like very high risk things that may or may not work if you're so inclined.

1:11:55That's okay. But don't get wrecked because if you have to like keep resetting from the bottom and rebuilding your like, you know, as you're just like poker analogy of like, you know, you go bust and you have to rebuild the bankroll and you have to grind the smaller tables and keep going up. You're just wasting years because you're kind of starting with, again, small amounts and having to rebuild. So I think having like your main packet of cigarettes, you know, safe and then taking risk is okay. And you still get that dopamine, but going all in and like this, like you said, some part of society just this like getting wrecked aspect of it's so entertaining that people want to watch it.

1:12:42It's like, they're so fascinated. Just as we're fascinated with, you know, risky physical behavior and like daredevils and like, you know, they might die. Like this is, that's the same thing with financial stuff. Like people love watching this guy, like, you know, especially like when it's public, like on Hyperliquid where you can just see the count going up and like these people get wrecked. It becomes like a watching sport. And then some people get addicted to being the character that's playing.

1:13:14If we have to recap, how should a, you said if you're less than 50 years old, you need to think about all this stuff, right? So if you're 20 to 50 year old. Even if you're like 50 or 60, I mean, you shouldn't be, look, I think there's going to be a lot of drugs discovered, a lot of medical, the one thing that AI has been incredibly good at, that one of the few things that I use it for is asking it like medical questions. It's such a incredible encyclopedia of like figuring out what all the possibilities are. And it's so good at that. And if you look at AlphaFold, the amount of drugs are going to be generated and like, you know, disease curing potential that's there.

1:13:58People can live longer if, you know, if they'll still be around in 10 years, they might live a lot longer than they expect. So having this mindset of like retiring, even if you're 50 years old, I think is, um, it's just like the wrong way to think about it. I think the world will not so much be as, as it used to be where, okay, once you're 65, you take what you've saved. And like, this is the point of life. I completely ignore all of, of like how that's worked and look forward to a time where, um, a lot of those base assumptions and those fundamental things have changed. So in a couple of sentences, how should a 20 to, let's say 70 year old guy or gal view retirement and wealth accumulation game now in 2025 for the next five to 10 years, given what we just discussed?

1:14:46Yeah. I think, um, if you're, if you're very young, um, and you don't have like a lot of resources yet, the most important thing is going to be like your skillset and your understanding of the world that's coming and being useful. If you're useful in this world, you're going to make so much money. It's going to be so valuable because like the, your labor is going to be one of the few labors that it's, that is useful. And so like the, you're seeing how much people are paying for open AI researchers now, a hundred million packages. I've heard like a billion dollar packages for years. These are not people who are speculating or gambling or doing investing.

1:15:22They're just economically productive. The fact that they're economically productive in a sector that is increasing so quickly is mind-boggling that these people are getting that much money just for being an employee, you know, like a wage cuck. But they're making a billion dollars being like a wage cuck. So clearly if you're young, if you can get the skill set to be productive, don't worry about like your shitcoin. You're wasting your fucking time trying to make it that way. Now, like I understand a lot of these kids, you know, they want to buy a car, They, you know, they want to get a girlfriend, like all this stuff.

1:15:58Okay. That's fine. Try, you know, you always have to balance both like your, your, your kind of a day-to-day reality that you want to have some wealth for your lifestyle and then like your longer term buildup. But you should be like, if you're young, you should be a hundred percent focused on this. Um, you know, like in my career, I've always had to balance the two, like one's like building business. Um, and then the other one is like making money to, you know, for me, it's like I invested in the business. So I play these games and I take the money and then I hire like really smart people and, you know, try to create an organization that is, is much more than the individual parts.

1:16:37And I've always had to do this. Like even, uh, for years I would do like a lot of individual trading, uh, which is not scalable. It's literally like whatever I make that day, the next day, it's not going to matter. Like I have to, it's not like building a business where you get recurring revenue. When you're trading, you're only as good as your last trade. So, you know, I'll trade for a year, I'll make X, and then I'll just hire really good people and buy really good technological components, whatever is needed to build something that has like more sustainability. And sometimes you have to live in both worlds.

1:17:12I get it. For young people, even for middle-aged people. If you can be economically productive, that's, that's huge. If not, and look, not everyone's going to be economically productive. You either have to be, you know, technical in the right ways, or you have to have psychological and good judgment, like very good soft skills, because the social dynamics as the world evolves are also going to evolve. And so having very good social dynamics is going to matter. I think the people that are most at risk are the ones that are like not very socially adept, but they're also like not that brilliant technically, they're just kind of okay.

1:17:53Those increasingly will kind of get squeezed by the two sides, like the EQ side and like the bar for like the technical side is going to get bigger and bigger.

1:18:07So play both games, try to be economically relevant. At the same time, if you're playing the wealth game, understand like first of all like where you are in the wealth game like it if you're just trying to like have enough to live a comfortable lifestyle then that's really important you have to get through that like you have to like be able to not be in survival mode i think we've talked about survival mode but like survival mode is when you you feel like you don't even have enough to get by it's it sucks so much of your mental energy to be in that mode that kind of kept me, you know, for years being in survival mode, you know, at my previous, uh, firm when I, I was just in a, um, a partner at a previous trading firm, I was working with one of the most brilliant, uh, technologists, you know, I've ever worked with.

1:18:54He was like the CTO, let's say like, I was like, uh, the trader. And I knew that we were both extremely talented, like compared to the whole world, I've worked in all these like other companies, I can see that we're good enough. And for some reason we would just like, not like we would do fine, but we wouldn't like outperform. And over like the, you know, the one Christmas holiday where I had some time to like slow down and reflect, I realized that why are two of the best people not able to get it, you know, get it going and underperforming. And it's because we were like in survival mode. And during the whole year, you just, that part of your day that you would spend on ideas and creativity and like, okay, what's, what's going to be like the good new thing that we should do and build towards.

1:19:41You're dealing with just this draining thing of like, oh no, like, um, there's a crisis over there. There's a fire we have to put out like, oh, we're, you know, we can't invest because we have to make sure that we don't like this kind of like survival mode. You can, you can view that as a, as a microcosm for, um, anyone who is like not comfortable say financially or just like not comfortable. And instead of thinking of like growth and construction, they just like are like defensive and like, how do I protect? I can't even get through the day. So get out of survival mode, number one, a hundred percent, like you need to do that.

1:20:19And I understand like people sometimes hyper gamble to get out of it. And, you know, if you don't have much and you're there and you don't know how to get out, then I can't say I don't understand it. I get where it's coming from. It's probably not going to work. It's not going to work for the vast majority of people. Yeah. I think if you're talented enough and you can just have productive labor, that's the way where you don't need luck. That's what people don't want to hear, right? Just fucking work and be valuable. Be better. And then on the top of that, if you understand this trend, where the puck is going, you can actually take this either take this money that you create and you reinvest in your business or if you believe there's other things out there that are going to be better than you you can invest a chunk of this money in these things or do a mix right and then there's no luck anymore this is just time yeah but people don't want to hear that yeah it's not a nice story in the the classic uh 10 year overnight success right no one wants to hear that yeah they want to hear the the one the one night overnight success or look.

1:21:26Yeah. And, you know, the fact that there's so much good content being created, you know, over the last years and, you know, we're creating some now and other people will continue to like make some valuable content. This is accessible to anybody, you know, on YouTube or on the internet. Anybody can find this content and upgrade their mindset or you didn't have this 10, 15, 20 years ago. Like when I grew up, no concept of like, you know, increasing your, your, your, your awareness level and you're, and you're by, by like watching other people, it's such a hack. It's such an incredible hack. If you find people that you can trust and there's a lot of noise.

1:22:03So like a lot of people start listening to the wrong, especially in crypto, you get these like charlatans, you know, they'd start and they get like a huge following cause they're, they're saying some catchy stuff. If you're following the wrong profits, let's say like the wrong people you're trying to learn from, you're already cooked because they are already dumb. And now you're, you're like dumber than they are because you're, you're even like trying to follow their dumbness. So you're, you're totally cooked. But as long as you like choose people to learn from that, um, uh, have figured out certain things, this is where the judgment comes in because, you know, judging who that is, but it's such a good hack for, it's something that I still use is like, I need to be able to evaluate even at my level.

1:22:44Like I need to keep growing and keep like learning so fast because there's so much going on. I need to like see if someone's credible. This is the most important decision I will make for my like mental growth. If I listen to someone who's credible and I take the shortcuts, because if I believe this guy understands this topic and he says something, I don't need to like, yes, it would be nice if I can understand all the math proof. I can do the proof and, you know, explain why that is. But if, you know, in the interest of, you know, time and energy, if I know Kevin, like you're the expert at like, you know, LLM growth.

1:23:22And you tell me like, you know, LLMs are not going to create super intelligence because they have this limitation. I don't need to understand it. I just need to start planning my life around, okay, maybe we have more years because this is not going to be the growth. So I'll take it from the expert. You know, I've decided you're credible. And so like, if people decide that, you know, I'm a credible person to help them in something that can be like a shortcut. I use a lot of these shortcuts. Increasingly, you want to be able to think for yourself more and more, but getting there is very useful to listen to the right people.

1:23:58So I use this a lot. This is why I'm passionate about creating content because I think the amount of people that you can help accelerate is something that we didn't used to have. And it's such a big grace for people like us that are, you know, they want to improve like they really want to improve themselves on the credible side i mean that's what i'm trying to do here right trying to build one of the most credible kind of media outlet or podcast in crypto and my goal since the beginning was how do i go through all this noise and help people i don't want to say select but there's not that many credible people in this industry and so if you can have them it can help and ask them decent questions hopefully it can help a lot of people because it's so easy to get to basically follow the wrong people and before you said people for the wrong people are cooked because they're following dumb people uh who are telling them dumb shit but there is also probably very smart people who are engagement farming less smart people yeah and basically screwing them over without them realizing and i mean it happens in this kind of kol world that's what happens all the time and so for me was really like how do we build this podcast where every week I have someone that I think based on my what, eight years in crypto, you go through the cycles and you see who is surviving and who is there and who is not taking shortcuts and who's not scamming everyone and who is not doing the wrong thing.

1:25:21I mean, you make mistakes sometimes, yeah, but that's the idea. How do we kind of help people get this shortcut? And there's still so much of this stuff happening in crypto. I mean, the amount of misallocation of capital, the game is still so inefficient. Like when you think about like, what's the game theory optimal way for digital assets to, uh, to move and things to happen. We're so far from it. Like it's, it's crazy to see the like day to day. Um, like if, if you're, if you're like, um, trying to win the game and, and, and kind of get it, it's not, it's still not that hard. I mean, it gets harder in certain like small things.

1:25:59Like guess if you're trying to like trade a certain way, like based off of charts or something, maybe, maybe some of those games are, are not going away. But the whole industry overall is still being formed. And a lot of money is going into the wrong places. Things get funded that shouldn't get funded. And a lot of things, if you just think from a first principles perspective, it's obvious that there's massive inefficiency in the industry still, which is a lot of opportunity. It's a huge amount of opportunity because there's a huge amount of money coming in. It's very important. Even in the age of AI, it's going to be even more important.

1:26:35Some people were thinking it was a fad or something, but the two technologies, I really believe, are extremely complementary. They're the two defining industries, I think, of this century, because one has to do with creating the building blocks for the intelligence. The other one has to do with creating the building blocks of the social coordination layer, which is you need both for society to thrive. And the social coordination layer is really going to be something using all these technology pieces that are getting invented on the crypto side. So being on top of that is already something that I feel really excited about.

1:27:21And we'll keep unlocking these new avenues. And like I said, Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum, like some of these things, maybe they're the cigarettes now. There's going to be new digital constructs of money and currencies that will get created in the next 10, 20 years that are going to potentially be something that people should try to be on top of and be early on. So get out of the survival mode by either gambling, which is very unlikely to work, either creating value, which is harder, but not necessarily that hard in industries that are very inefficient where there's so many opportunities. And once you're out of this survival mode, talk about going full offense.

1:28:11Yeah, I mean, look, yeah, yes. Like first getting out of survival mode, that takes, for me, getting out of survival was first like a mental shift. You need to understand that you're in survival mode so you can like realize that, okay, this is draining my energy. I need to get out of this. what specifically do I need to do? So, you know, in every single individual's case, what it will take to get up survival is different. I can only speak about my specific thing, but the thing I think is universal is the mindset. Realize that you need to be out of that. Get focused on how to achieve that. What does it take?

1:28:51And then there's a period where you have to potentially just work like a horse because you have to like out sprint like that. You have to get out of that gravitational pull and just get out of that field. Once you're out, then you actually get superpowers because you're not in survival mode anymore. And then it unlocks so much more. So this concept of like front loading the work, which like any startup will tell you, yeah, like, you know, the first going from zero to one, like getting that, you have to sometimes like, you know, sleep on the floor, are just kind of, you got to do whatever it takes.

1:29:28So sacrifice in the short term, medium term to get out of survival mode is key. Once, once you're out of it, then I think it's different. I think, um, you know, you need to work smarter, not harder. So smarter matters a lot more once you're out of that. And, um, scalably like think about scale, you can have something that you can keep repeating and keep generating, you know, thousand dollars a day. If you keep doing that, that's fine, but it doesn't scale. So you'll never upgrade further than that. And for some people that are happy, you know, they make a thousand dollars a day and they do their little Amazon store or whatever it is.

1:30:14And that's, that's okay. If you're trying to keep upgrading yourself, then that's not enough. And ultimately you do enough of that. Like I said, there's two paths at the same time. You have to do both. You have to make money. So you kind of make this thousand dollars a day. And then in your extra time, you have to start thinking about like, okay, how is this going to scale? What do I do with this? And ultimately like go up to the next level and then the next level. So that's something I've managed to do for several levels. I still have many levels to go, but like I've done it so many times now that it's like second nature where, yes, like you make the cigarettes and then you trade them for something that's going to generate more stuff.

1:30:54And kind of the key thing in all of it is upgrading yourself. This is the constant. And so, yeah, once you're out of survival mode, when I said like offense, yeah, offense is like,

1:31:12if you're not happy with like the constant, every day just do your thing and you're trying to go to the next level, which is my situation. Offense is taking some risk. Without risk, society doesn't upgrade itself, doesn't improve itself. Without people, all the large companies were always involving risk at certain times of their life cycle. And so smart risk, nothing's for sure. Obviously, I'm saying I'm super deep in crypto and not that much owning stocks. That's a very concentrated, aggressive approach. I'm not saying everybody should be doing that. But making those type of concentrated bets gets you to the next level.

1:31:59Then you consolidate and think about that. So I'm in offense mode right now, yeah. And for you, you mentioned offense mode was having like 10 mil safe and then the other half. yeah the 10 mil is i mean it's just like an arbitrary number but it's like this is like the survival mode where you don't have to think about you know your rent and stuff like this for a long time for like you know indefinite future so let's say like getting to 10 million 10 you have to get to like 15 20 because you know you need the 10 let's say aside and then you take the rest and you start being okay like if i lose this extra 10 that i have if I have 20, if I, if I, if I have 10 out of survival mode and I lose the 10, it's, it's not going to change day-to-day life much, right?

1:32:48It's fine. Like you, you sort of rebuild and grow again, but being in offense mode basically says, okay, I'm not going to treat this as like a very, uh, um, you know, riskless thing where I have to just put some in bonds and whatever. I'm just going offense and try to get to like, you know, this like next level where you can start doing things that, you know, we've seen like Elon, let's say, you know, taking his wealth and just quickly generating a whole like AI company competitor in like such a short amount of time just by having a ton of money throw at it. and that does a lot. Or he buys Twitter and then he gets into the White House and suddenly he has all this influence on the world.

1:33:35There's ways to use the cigarettes really well right now. So I'm not saying don't... If you're in the game where you can get to the next level and do something with it, I think it's still going to matter to do that. In these two buckets, let's say 10-10 or whatever, 5-5, where does Bitcoin fit today? I think Bitcoin is like your base asset. And I see like, even it's funny because you talk to a lot of crypto founders. I talked to some of these founders and like, you know, they have their own coin, but so many of them are like Bitcoin. I don't want, they're not maxis, but like they're just trying to stack Bitcoin.

1:34:15But it's the base asset in the offense bucket or could it even become like the base assets in the defense bucket? We just don't do anything. There is volatility, but it's supposed to go up. or why would you even hold much cash? Yeah, I think at this stage, it's a good base asset in general. It's more for offense. So, I mean, like defense is probably still, you know, your defensive basket is, because you need to write, defense means like short-term volatility, you need to write it. So you need a good amount of fiat-denominated things to write short-term volatility. So base asset for offense for now, I would say.

1:34:57And there's always this concept of like market timing and cycles. And it's a four-year cycle. I've already said, like, I think the four-year cycles are over. Now we're just like in a different regime. So that once I thought about it from my first principles and I realized all the pieces that were contributing to the four-year cycle, like the economic cycle or the sort of mining cycle, you know, with the halbanings or all these pieces, they're all gone. So like this whole concept, you know, I just like throw it away. And so it's less about that. It's just like there are liquidity kind of like sugar rushes that are happening.

1:35:33Like when Trump passed this like big, beautiful bill, suddenly like we've gone from a place where he's talking about tariffs and like restricting to suddenly like there's just a lot of money going to be spent. Once you get into that liquidity part of this, of like these like mini cycles, assets going to go up a lot. if you want to be fancy and not just put it in something and not do anything and you want to ride these cycles, you can, but you need to be on top of it. You need to be very sophisticated understanding of where we are. I do think there's going to be a point where Bitcoin overshoots.

1:36:09We're not anywhere near that. I think some of these treasury companies now, they're all trying to front run those guys and their buys. It creates a lot of momentum, which as any asset in history, this asset at some point will overshoot and there will be a correction. Now getting off the train too early, you might miss a lot of the returns. So it's an art, it's not a science. If you want to at some point be like, okay, it's getting crazy. Let's sell some of this asset and try to buy back later. That's probably a game that I will try to play. and I'll try to know when to do it, but you don't have to.

1:36:57How far do you think we are in mid-August, mid to late August 2025? How far do you think we are from this overshooting of Bitcoin or crypto in general? I think it's different. I think crypto, we're seeing a lot of late stage things happening right now, especially with treasury vehicles for all kinds of different altcoins happening. and people are very greedy right now. We're in a greed mode. So when that happens, it means that these mini liquidity cycles are, there's probably one coming to an end relatively soon. So on the Bitcoin larger cycle, I think it's still very early and nowhere near, it's still like a small percentage of gold.

1:37:48We're nowhere near there. And that's why I think on a year's horizon, you can still play that Bitcoin game. You're still early. And ironically. Let's talk a bit about judgment.

1:38:06Focus on the rate of your income and skill growth, learning the new tools, and refining your judgment. This takes a lot of ego work, as only a healthy ego can have unclouded judgment.

1:38:21Tell me a bit more about your ego health journey and kind of how people can get to a healthy ego place, which is so important. You said before, for the next couple of years. Yeah, I think, um, the journey starts with deconstruction and then construction. The most important thing is the foundation. if you have a very solid foundation you can build skyscrapers if your ego foundation is weak you get to a certain point and then you start sabotaging yourself or you start having you know addictions you know these financial death wishes it's because they're built on like an unstable foundation so most of us you know we've we have some traumas from our early life or we've gone through different things that have like molded us.

1:39:15I meet a lot of like young, talented people, but I can see that they're similar to what I had to do, which is they can't keep building where they are because, you know, some of their habits are just wrong. They have to first deconstruct. You have to like just bring everything down, rubble it. And that's the hardest part of like the ego cleansing process is like it feels like you're going down. And as like people that want to improve, we always want to go up. We always want to get better, better, better. And with the ego, the first stage is like, first you have to go down. So why do you have to go down?

1:39:51It's like,

1:39:55you need to go back into the basement and like build everything solidly. And our first attempt at building the building is probably not going to be solid. Unless you have like perfect parents that give you all the good habits. You've been like around a very solid,

1:40:12safe place that's also challenged you in the right ways. And it's possible. Obviously, like, you know, I want to do that to my kids. I want to give them the head start where they don't have to have an unsettled foundation and then bring everything down. I, you know, I meet some kids that they just, their childhood was so good that they just have it and they just keep going. And it's incredible to like see some of these 20 year olds. but a lot of us didn't have that perfect molding. So the process is, you realize that there's some bad habits, there's some bad mindsets. And a lot of it is like, you talk about the voice in your head.

1:40:50I remember back in the day having a voice in my head and it's like, what are people thinking about you? And like, oh, I shouldn't have done that. And I look like this. It's a lot of cloudiness. so the clouded judgment a lot it's like very cloudy when you have these voices and you have these like insecurities a lot of it's insecurity and fear so much basically everything is fear if you look deep deep enough um why are people insecure why are they unstable they're scared they're scared of something so this process involves like understanding what you're scared of what's causing like a short circuit and like a reaction that is not a constructive reaction.

1:41:41It's just like, you know, it's more of a pathological reaction. Understanding your fears. Yes, like sometimes we need to do some introspection, some therapy, some, you know, some people try hallucinogenics. Like you need to get in touch with that fear. Understand that fear. Bring yourself down. And this is how you know you're going to win. When you're willing to accept that you go to ground one and accept that you're not really accomplished, you're not really anyone yet. You're not really, you know, the weakest people are the ones who think I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best. And people don't realize it, but I'm the best.

1:42:28That's a loser. you're on the wrong path the right path goes through blank canvas my ego is basically telling me it's okay that I don't know anything it's okay that I'm not anything

1:42:51be okay with that state that's the first foundation very solid because now everything that you build on top, you're not doing it because there's psychological need or a fear behind it. You're doing it because it's actually like solid. And if you're learning something and you're going to use it as an assumption for building the Morstar, like, you know, these building blocks sometimes are just heuristics in our head. Like there are these like assumptions that we have. And if you have good assumptions and they're solid and they're correct, you can really start to like stack them on top of each other.

1:43:32And if you're mathematically minded, one way to think about it is, if you're gonna stack 10 levels and each one is 99.999 % accurate, the loss of like multiplying 99.99 times to the 10th level or to the 100th level, you're still most of the time I'm going to have accurate judgment. Your decision has to go through this funnel. And if you have a hundred levels that are 99.99, even to the hundredth degree, you'll still get it right like 95 % of the time. But if you're, each level is like 90%, which sounds good, but you haven't like really cleaned it. If you try to go through, you know, try to do like on the calculator, 0.9 to the hundredth power.

1:44:23So you have to get through a hundred levels at only 90. so you might lose 10 % of each time. You're basically never right. So the difference between 90 and 99.9, even though it looks like they're kind of close to each other, once you amplify it by multiple levels, it's everything. So what I strive to do for super high performance is getting that difference from 99.9 to 99.99. And it's all in these nuances. you sometimes have to go very deep on the details. And obviously like there's limited time. We can't do that with everything. You can't like, so the skill is basically knowing when you go deep, when it's worth your time to, you know, like if you're creating a product, sometimes I read this thing about like, you know, this like successful card game, the guy went to the factory in Asia that was going to create the cards and sat there and the lamination, it has to feel in the hand.

1:45:29And he was obsessed with getting this detail right. For his business, that was such a brilliant thing to do because that visceral experience that people were going to have, the tiniest detail will upgrade it. So that 99.99 that he did on that detail of the business was correct. Now, obviously, he has limited time, So you can't be doing that with, you know, the outside packaging. He has to choose his battles. And when you choose the right battle and you go deep, that's how you get the massive performance. You said the blank sheet, blank canvas. Let's try that. Yeah. How could you be wrong about your entire thesis for the next five to 10 years?

1:46:13In terms of fiat debasement or in terms of Bitcoin or which thesis? Like when you're saying, Hey, this is how to play the wealth generation game and how to kind of make it. I mean, obviously there is a, there's a measure, which is how much am I worth today? So there is, it's kind of like saying something and I kind of understand. Right. But again, we're kind of like talking about this deconstructing ego. How could you be wrong? Uh, there's nothing, there's no chance of being wrong. Cause it's like a mathematical proof. I'm just, uh, stating things from first principle standpoint. like improving your resources.

1:46:50So like your knowledge, your judgment, your habits, your connections, like the people that you can work with because, you know, as humans, we're much more powerful together. There's a lot of lone wolves that can do certain things by themselves. And there's a lot of hyper-talented people. But the way to think about it is like, I'll never be as good a mathematician as like a Terence Tao. And I'll never be good at, you know, devising AI as like a but I can still like find something that I'm specifically good at and as you know you put these pieces together they're much more powerful than like what each one of us can do I mean I would never be able to like be productive if there wasn't somebody like building roads and like you know cooking the food and doing all these other stuff that like allows me to do this so having your having connections and having people that you play long-term games with where you can start building trust and like knowing that he's not going to try to immediately like, you know, take the, take the money.

1:47:50And then like, you know, you can start cooperating and having different skill sets and surrounding yourself with people that you can work well together with and constructing together is super powerful. So there's no world where this is, you know, my thesis is wrong. Like, it's just so fundamental that yes, you should, you should put all these resources, have them, have them together and be ready for huge shifts that are coming in society, in the economy, in money, and certainly in labor, like what labor means and what labor is productive and be ready. So be dynamic. So there's no world where you shouldn't be able to adapt.

1:48:37You work very hard. You worked super hard for many years. I remember you telling me, I think one or two years ago, that you were sleeping like, I mean, probably was the worst, kind of craziest moment of your life, but you were sleeping four hours every two nights. So like four hours every 48 hours. And I remember a bunch of the guys that you invested in were saying, oh, man, usually you're supposed to work harder than your investor, but it's impossible for me to work harder than Jordi. And then you experienced burnout. What did you learn? What's one or two things? Because I think in this industry or in entrepreneurship in general, it happens a lot.

1:49:20And it's very easy to be in denial and not really realize, right? What's one or two things that were happening in your body or your mind that you ignored and now realize in hindsight were signs that a big burnout would come? Yeah, I mean, the front-loading is necessary, but then also you can reach burnout. I mean, I certainly did last year. At some point it was, it was after our podcast. Like at some point I just hadn't taken a break or taken any like mental holiday. The accumulation of stress is, it puts you back in survival mode. It's not like the mindset, but it's like, you know, just like the stress in the background.

1:50:03Like this, it like affects your muscles. They tense it up. Like, you know, you need a massage. Like it's just, it's this background stress. So I've realized that that's usually what gets you when you're pushing too hard and you need to, of course, like, you know, cliche, you need to take care of your physical self, right? So like there's certain limits that you can only do for one year, like two years. Like at some point, like your body's gonna like start rebelling. And I hit a point last summer where I just became paralyzed. I was like in bed for like two days, couldn't eat. It was just my body completely shutting off.

1:50:45Um, and I hadn't taken any breaks. I hadn't taken a Christmas holiday. I was like working through, through the holidays every day. And at some point by like June, by like May, um, just, just complete, complete shutdown. So even if you're driven and you want to succeed, Like it's, it's clearly not productive to get to that point. Cause like you're, you're shut off. Um, I've gotten better at, you know, taking moments to, to rebalance, um, trying to be smarter instead of harder, you know, trying, trying to, um, Are we saying no to more things or almost everything? Yeah. saying no is, you know, I'm one of those people that our default is to try to help people.

1:51:37My, my default is like somebody asked for something. I want to respond. Sometimes high performers just like, don't even respond. Like I would ask some, some important guy something and he would just like leave me on red. And I used to take this as a, you know, I was like, oh, he's not even responding. You know, I'm not important enough. What, what is this? You know, that's like the ego kind of waking up and then you just accept that they're a very busy individual and they, you know, they have hundreds of people messaging them in the same way. And they just, you know, they, they, they have to ignore.

1:52:07Probably they even forgot like a minute later, they even forgot your message. So it's not even, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, and so like, you know, if you want a response, maybe like make sure that you're, you're valuable enough, you're important enough in what you're talking about that they, you know, they have to prioritize it because they will be responding to some people. You're just like not, um, giving them something that is, is like that relevant. And yeah, certainly like taking, protecting my time, um, is, is I'm getting increasingly better at, um, I'm, I'm, I'm still like not wanting to waste time.

1:52:50So the weird thing is like, your downtime, like your more like relaxing time, you still try to make that productive. And I think this is something that lets me still grow at the rate, even though I take it a little bit easier, which is my, you know, like I play like competitive poker against like literally like the most talented poker players in the world. And I try to compete with them. For a lot of people, it's a very stressful like experience to do. because you have to be so perfect and so focused for so many hours to be able to compete in that kind of environment. For me, it's like a meditation and it actually like relaxes me because it's just, in some ways it's an easy thing because the rules are defined.

1:53:38It's not like real life or entrepreneurship where the rules are not defined and sometimes you go outside the boundaries. You know, there's 52 cards. This is how many there are. It's not going to change. There's some fixed things. And so it's like, yes, you have to get into the details and the nuances, but it's a microcosm. And living in that microcosm of that game, you can just experience that. And why do I say it's productive? There's so many lessons. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why a lot of successful people, entrepreneurs and investors, play a lot of poker, for example. one it's like a training for the mindset for you know you can take the things that seem to work you figure out what works in the poker game and then you take those pieces and you can apply them in like your main thing so I get asked by founders if they should learn poker and I say like yeah I say yes If somebody says, should I be a professional poker player?

1:54:47I say, no, that's not necessarily like a good career for many reasons. It's like a very stressful thing to have to do to make money. And like very few people should be doing that. There's like a few in the world that, you know, makes sense, but no, but should you learn poker and try to apply those things in like your decision-making in real life? I think absolutely yes. For all levels, even if it's like a beginner level, it's still useful. what's the thing that you are holding on to, but you know you should let go of? Oh, wow. You hit me with a strong one. It's the last one. It's the last one.

1:55:35I believe that these things happen naturally. I think a lot of people do have that bias where their default is to just kind of keep holding on to something because it's comfortable, you're familiar. Not having it is kind of putting you into an unstable, unfamiliar place. I'm quite comfortable with the unfamiliarity. In fact, I even seek it a little bit. I think having a little bit of that, like risk seeking, adventure seeking, that sense of wonder of like the unknown, it doesn't make me hold on to things longer than I should. I think sometimes it might look like I'm holding it on, but everything has its time where it ends and you sort of conclude it.

1:56:31I think like, you know, this, this podcast I've been doing, the SteadyLads podcast is one example where, you know, we, we did it, we did like a hundred episodes every single week, every single Friday showed up. It didn't matter if I was sick traveling, it's 3am. It doesn't matter. I would show up consistently do it. And we're still doing it. You know, it's still like a valuable conversation that people tune into. They seem to like it. And I get so many people coming up to me, in different places and really thanking for the podcast and wanting to continue it. So we're continuing it, but at the same time, I want to create content that is broader maybe than just crypto or maybe not just talking about little games or PvP games are happening in crypto, but something bigger.

1:57:21And so for me, when I said that I'm not going to do it weekly anymore and I want spending that limited time I have for content creation on other things. That was an example of giving something up and moving on. So right now nothing comes to mind right now. Hopefully we managed to do that today, talk about something that is a bit bigger than these little games in crypto. and thank you for doing that. That was amazing. I think people will love it. Yeah. I loved it a lot. Like I said, we'll do this every year or two and we'll see how the river changes and how the person changes. Amazing. Thank you, Jordi.

1:58:11Thank you.