E44: Jordi Alexander: The Man Who Stayed Awake for $24 Million!

27:36And maybe to my detriment, I know you can look at it both ways, but I just fight through. And then once I make it through, I'm on the other side. and there's something that it gives me. Do you think this is tied to ego?

27:55No, it doesn't come from a place of ego for me. I think it's just something that's worked and if it keeps working, I just keep doing it. If I realize at some point that I need help to get to the next level, I've recently been thinking like, should I get an executive coach? I go through these thoughts. sometimes I'll try something for a little bit and it will help but I have been rather individual in my self-development Richard Rose said the ego is the single biggest obstruction to the achievement of anything do you agree with this? 100 % I mean I have seen my life completely change once my ego is under control.

28:43And I see in a lot of young people these days, I think maybe what you mentioned about social media creates a lot of anxiety, both for females and males at, you know, under 30 years old. And they're trying to show off to their friends, to the world, they want to show that they're good, they're popular, they're pretty, and they have money, you know, even if it's just sort of like getting an expensive watch when they could barely afford it this type of thing um coming from that place you're not going to be able to achieve much you're going to keep getting in your own way it's a really interesting one the ego one because what i realized is i mean it's very it's basically completely tied to your insecurities and it's actually ego it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing or kind of an evil but people need to understand and i've saw previous relationships that the ego you built your ego because you've been through really hard shit in your life it's a defense mechanism exactly it's a defense mechanism and the problem with it is not helpful especially later in life and especially in real relationship that are already hard you know uh with other people and so when you see i mean the reason why people always talk about communication right the problem of everything is communication in a company, in a marriage, in a relationship.

30:09Like one of the key problem why communication is bad is because people have this ego that they developed and kind of cultivated throughout their life because a lot of people had a tough childhood like you had. And the problem is at some point you need to, in a relationship, it's basically, or in a business relationship, when you build a company, one of the biggest reason why companies fail is not product market fit or running out of cash is founder problem. Like there's just one or the other living and it happens all the time, but no one talks about it. And it's all the time linked with the freaking ego.

30:47Even if it's just one of them, it doesn't even have to be both of them. Even if one founder has this issue, it'll spread and it'll create a problem. And I have this issue myself, you know, as a founder, I have to decide which one is better, like having somebody support you and having somebody where you can take a break and they take the wheel and they can drive or risking that you're going to have a misalignment of vision with a co-founder. So we said you have a daughter. You have a life co-founder. I think like one of the things that I've always known was that I do want to have children. And always, or it came later on?

31:22No, I always knew. I thought I was kind of potentially okay with not having children. I went through life thinking, oh, I'll leave it up to the girl. You know, if she wants them, I'll have them. If not, like that, that's fine. That's the nice dude side. That's, you know, it was all about the partner, right? I was more focused on the woman, the partner. And then at some point when I was like 28, 29, 30, I dated somebody briefly that, you know, she was very clear. She did not want to have kids. And it was the first time that I was actually confronted with that because before it was a theoretical concept, like, oh, I'll leave it up to the woman, she'll decide, and I'm fine with either decision.

32:03But when she actually said that, and she meant it, I realized I was like kidding myself, like, no, like, I'm actually not okay with that. I realized it's such a fundamental or organic part of, you know, my genes really to procreate that I would not want to deny that to myself. Why would we even be on earth if it's not to procreate and have children? It doesn't make any sense. I know you spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of life. Yeah. What's the meaning of life and how did having a daughter kind of help you in your search for the meaning of life? So I don't think it helped in the search.

32:44I think it's just part of that process where if you think from first principles and you go to the end and you say, what the fuck are we doing here? Like, why are we here? where are we trying to go, right? And there's questions we can't answer. We're like chipmunks, right? Like squirrels. And we're trying to solve this like algebra, calculus. It's very hard to do it. We don't have the ability to do it. Like I'm trying to understand like what is the purpose of earth and the solar system, all these things. We don't know. And what I concluded is the only way forward is to make the next generation better than us.

33:22And then maybe they'll figure it out. So that's what we can do is provide the path for, you know, the future of humanity or, you know, our ancestors to eventually be able to go down that path. And once there's super intelligence and once we evolve, you know, in a thousand years, they'll manage to find that meaning. Because for us, it's not going to be possible in our lifetime probably. So it's basically the concept of living a legacy. Yeah. So like when you play chess. It's not money-wise, right? It's really, or building things is more like life. It's definitely not money-wise. It's definitely all about creating a better version of the previous generation.

34:04So it's moving. You want this growth. You need like this exponential growth to keep happening into the future. And I see it a lot. I played a lot of chess growing up. And sometimes you can't calculate all the moves. When you're early in the game, you can calculate five moves ahead. And if you keep focusing, maybe you can do 10 moves ahead. But ultimately, you can't go through the end. And this is kind of how I feel about the meaning of life. We can't see through to like the final move in the checkmate. We don't know where it is. All we can do is play a move that is good on the board. And things will like develop by themselves as, you know, there's a counter move by the opponent, who in this case is like the universe.

34:44And we'll keep making moves and trying to progress. And we can't predict the full finish. What made you start thinking about the meaning of life? Is it some bad moments? Or is it just making a lot of money and then realize this doesn't make me any happier? Like I'm kind of lost still, which happens to a lot of people. Yeah. You know, like how did you start thinking about that? And because I also realized in my life, the moment I started to think about these things is actually the moment I don't feel good. No, for me, it was just from a very young age, trying to piece together the universe and these basic questions of, are there aliens?

35:27Like, what's out there? Sort of looking, when I look at the sky and look at the moon, I'm realizing that we're just like this little rock and we're insignificant. And trying to make a meaning of that is sort of where it starts. And I'll say one thing, money has made me a lot happier. I don't know who these people are that like, you know, they're like worse off. We'll get to that. So are there any aliens? Probably. Very probably, right? It's impossible if you think about how many planets and stars there are, that we would be the only ones here. Like it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But the scary thing is, I don't know if you know about this great filter theory, but there's the idea of, you know, if there's all these aliens, why haven't they come here?

36:12Why haven't we seen them? and there's two options either it's such a rarity to get through the filter of survival to be able to get to intergalactic travel that it's extremely unlikely that we're going to make it through because we haven't yet gone through the filter and that's quite a scary thought because it means you know we're gonna eventually end up like everybody else ended up which is probably making ourselves extinct through like some nuclear bombs or through AI there's there's multiple paths by which we can imagine aliens and other civilizations just reaching the end of their existence, that it might be very similar to ours.

36:48They might be just creating an artificial creature that kills them. It could be just a nuclear reaction. So that's one, but you said there's another? Yeah, the other one is like the more optimistic, which is that, you know, it's so rare what we've already achieved as humanity, having gone to, you know, the ape and from a single cell organism to where we are now, that that was the hard part. And we were through that filter. And now it's actually fine because we are the very few in the whole galaxy maybe that have made it through. And maybe there's no other aliens that have made it through. And we're very unique in that case.

37:25What about, I mean, both are very interesting. I thought about something much more simple, which for me seems just logical. So mathematically it's impossible that there is no one else, right? But I was just thinking the reason we don't see them is just because we have our senses and with our eyes or our ears or our smell, we're just not able to see them. So they might be just around us, but we just can't see them because we just have our own human program. So you're kind of getting into, I guess, parallel universes or potentially like metaphysics, which... It's going to be the topic for another day.

38:04Yeah.

38:08What do I need to understand about your early context to understand the Jordi who is sitting in front of me today in this podcast studio on this beautiful day of Choptober? Sure. Look, like there's lessons that I've learned that are applicable to everybody, but just for context, there were certain benefits and certain, you know, hindrances that I grew up with. And I was born, I would say, with, you know, a lot of intelligence. It was kind of clear from a young age I could solve problems very quickly and learn things quickly. So I did have that advantage. How do you realize that? Because people tell you?

38:51They told me all the time. It became like part of my ego and self-identity. Like, oh, you're so smart. Like this was from like, you know, age three, I was playing chess. and it was just always very clear. So this was eventually unhealthy because it sort of tied my reality to this concept. But I have to say that I wasn't stereotypical in that sense. My parents were both, my grandparents, farmers, right? Like rural in Cyprus, just no education, just kind of figuring stuff out where they were. And then - You grew up in Cyprus. I grew up in the US actually in Boston. My parents were the first of their generation to go to college or know about college.

39:34And they made that leap from farmers to Harvard, PhDs, university professors, both of them. So I would say like there was like a unique kind of genetic choosing there that I had naturally from that spot. But the downside was there was no like culture in my family of how to adapt to you know the modern world really or like even um how to deal with money or things like this my parents while very academically intelligent were lacking a lot of emotional sophistication and as a child I didn't get any nourishment or any direction it was sort of like you know they gave me the genes and just like told me to study hard and that like, you know, that was it.

40:22Like they were all in their own worlds. They were so different to each other as well. You know, they say like opposites attract. And I think from a genetic sense, it makes sense. Like you want the children to balance out the things that are very extreme about you. So you can have two opposites attract, but then they, you know, they're not going to stay together after they procreate. And that's kind of what happened to my family. Very soon after it was clear that my father is super logical, just a very math focused, you know, I still like remember when I was a kid, I read one of his book reviews on Amazon and it says like the math in this book is like going to make you cry.

41:02Like it's like painful for like students to try to read the math. And my mother, she can't even like think about, you know, five plus five. She's just a very emotionally based creature. You know, she writes a lot of psychology and things about politics and stuff like this, but just complete opposites. So I was born in this world of seeing extremes. I went from living in the US to then having to move to Cyprus, which especially 20 years ago, we're talking about like first world place, all the resources, everything there. And then you go to a, it's not a third world country, but it's definitely, at the time it was second world.

41:44We're in Cyprus. So Nicosia, like the capital, which is an intense place. It's not on the beach and having fun. It's sort of a serious place there. Yeah. So you grew up in the U.S. Then you moved back to Cyprus. Yeah. Then what? It was a very hard transition there. So you were 19 years old. No, no. I was like 13, 14, did high school there. Yeah, different world. I had to adapt. I think it was very good for me having to, you know, be around different culture, different language. You start to realize that a lot of the assumptions that you make about the world, they instantly get broken. Because you think that, oh, like, you know, this is how buildings are.

42:25This is how children are. This is how people treat you. And then you just get completely different perspective. Then you go to the Mediterranean side of Cyprus, completely different. Wow. Yeah. How did you leave that as a 13, 14 years old? I was quite upset. I didn't want to leave the US. I was flourishing there. I was actually on a path to extremely well in school and everything else. And it derailed me in life quite a bit. And it took me like 15 years to recover. I was, you know, in a high school where, first of all, there was a lot of anti-American sentiment. And even though my parents were Cypriot, like I was 100 % by blood Cypriot, they treated me as an American.

43:06And I got bullied a lot by like, you know, the big kids, especially. I'm a prime target for bullying because I have, you know, the achievement and intelligence. And I'm also like very relaxed and easygoing. So it's not usually like the nerd who gets bullied. It's the one who is like too cool for school because he doesn't play by the rules. And I was kind of an easy target for bullying. I would stand up to myself very aggressively. I wouldn't like let things get passed and ended up in a lot of fights. and I was always sort of getting in trouble, but not the one getting in trouble because that would manipulate the situation to, I got people expelled from school.

43:47Like they would mess with me and then I would get them kicked out. Too smart.

43:55Okay, so how many years did you stay in Cyprus? Did high school there. And then, you know, trying to go to college in the US, this is sort of a point where I think if I had stayed in the US, I would have probably gone to, you know, top school, onto like, you know, Princeton or something like that. And then just sort of rolled through where I would have the opportunity to work at McKinsey for a few years and then just to kind of do this standard stuff. That's what I wanted to do too. What's that? I wanted to be a McKinsey consultant too. I mean, you talked to the founder of Antler, right? Absolutely.

44:28I saw this interview and he's just like, yeah, this, I got the grade, I went to Harvard, McKinsey and then I started and everything is just sort of like smoothly done. I had like the most turbulent path that was, took forever to kind of get up, get back on course. And I think that led to a lot of depression as well. So not only in that year where you broke up, but even before that, you were struggling with mental health because of, I mean, this very kind of volatile childhood in terms of. parenting and the way they loved you and in terms of sort of moving to different places and kind of coming back to a third world country after living in the US yeah I think I definitely used my ego as a defense mechanism I see very clearly this like way of being insecure and overcompensating for it by being like overconfident so people would think I'm arrogant but I was actually acting insecure because I didn't feel that I could back up you know the talent that I had in a way.

45:31And even after when I started to be successful, I did have a little bit of imposter syndrome for for some years, like that was a struggle where people were treating me as if, you know, I'm this like, you know, extremely successful guru. And I felt that I hadn't earned it yet, especially with crypto, you know, getting into crypto. I put a few thought pieces out there and ended up being right about various topics. And I was treated with like reverence, like this guy, like, you know, let's follow him, let's figure him out. And I went from, you know, having two followers to having, you know, let's say like 50 ,000 pretty quickly.

46:09And, uh, I definitely had some imposter syndrome at that, at that stage. Why do you think so many successful people experience imposter syndrome? I think it's healthy. It kind of shows that you're starting from a place of, you don't just assume that you have it, you need to see it in action. It's actually healthier to have to prove to yourself over and over again that I can achieve results, I am making good decisions. And then you can overcome the imposter syndrome by witnessing that you're correct. So that's the way. That's the way. Okay. Now I'm at the other extreme of it now. I feel like having gone through imposter syndrome and feeling undervalued is kind of like crypto where the fundamentals actually improve a lot, but the price hasn't improved.

46:57And I think I'm a little bit slept on now. So how do you go from doing high school in Cyprus to becoming a poker player to building a market making firm in crypto? What's the journey there? Yeah, the high school was sort of like the way I spent time was playing games. I played like international level chess, bridge, and started to get into poker around 18. And I had a natural knack for games and probability. I could always kind of fluidly look at probability distribution and feel it, which is kind of a rare skill I've realized. So in college, I played a lot of poker, managed to do quite well. I made a lot of money.

47:46I could pay my own tuition. In the US? In the US, yeah. This was an opportunity to kind of cut ties with my father as well because he was very controlling and telling me what classes to take and what to do because he was paying. And I've faced this a few times in my life where somebody has like short-term financial control over me and I have to play by the rules. But then as soon as I'm able to escape that, there's like this freedom that comes from that. What's your relationship with your parents today? So good relationship with my mother. I haven't spoken to my father since over a decade. Wow.

48:30Yeah. How do you feel about that? Is it because he's not making too much ego? Too much ego, definitely. On his side? Yeah, yeah, 100%. So you're waiting for him to come back? I'm not waiting. I think I waited for a couple of years where I thought that maybe he would kind of be able to get his shit together and understand that he was wrong about how he behaved. But I would say at this point, it doesn't really kind of cross my mind. It's something that I know is the right decision to do. And I feel a lot healthier, because you don't have this psychological drag of somebody treating you as if, you know, you're disappointing them, or there's something that you should be doing differently than who you actually are.

49:15And you can just be yourself. That's very interesting. So you're in the camp of saying like, like a kind of toxic relationship with a woman, you should cut it even if it's your parents, because there's another camp that says, oh, my parents, they kind of traumatized me one way or another. But for me to feel better about the whole thing, I should go and kind of, you know, they try to do their best. They did their best anyway. And it's probably coming from a place of love and their own trauma with their own parents, the way they acted with me, right? And so because I understand that I will make the effort even if I know that his ego is still going to be there forever.

49:50You never thought about that? I thought about that. Yeah, but I think it's still unhealthy and you still need to get away, even if you can excuse it. So I'm not angry at anybody. And you know, this is kind of like the way you find peace. You lose the anger because you say all those things that you said, like people go through their own childhood, their own journey, they have their own scars, and that's why they act a certain way and have their own defense mechanisms and I understand and I'm actually very tolerant of you know most people's imperfections and their strategies for life because it's it's fucking hard so I understand it but you know there's still an element of okay like if the snake is gonna bite you and it's poisonous like you can not be angry at the snake but you still don't want to be around him.

50:35What would you do if he came back today? Just see if he changed and if there was a way to have a healthy dynamic or not. So you cut ties when you become kind of financially independent thanks to poker. Was poker a way to say I'm going to become financially dependent or it's something you really wanted to do as a professional career? I didn't want to do it as a professional career. I think it was the best way to achieve financial dependence for a short period of time. I love the game and I love playing, but I'm not somebody that... There's a scalability problem with poker, right? Like even if you're very good, you're playing one table.

51:17Let's say you're managing to beat it at like$100 an hour,$1 ,000 an hour. At the end of the day, you have to sit at that one table and give your time for money. And you have to make this exchange. even if you're playing online and you're playing 10 tables and each one is making like$200. So you're making$2 ,000 an hour. It's still an exchange that doesn't scale for forever and doesn't make me comfortable that it achieves the growth that I want to achieve for myself. What's your craziest poker story that you want to share with us? Or the most fun one? Because I'm sure there's people who want to understand.

51:51Actually on Twitter, I read a bunch of comments of people asking you to talk about poker. Sure. I mean, poker, I still play a lot, not a lot in terms of hours, but a lot in terms of when I do it, I'll go to Vegas, you know, every June World Series of Poker. I'll play 10, 15 events. I'll really try to focus on it for like three weeks and take those lessons that I learn at the table and bring them to like the rest of my year with trading, with business, with everything else. and I don't just play to fuck around. I mean, I'm playing against the very, very best, the top players at the highest stakes and trying to compete with them and beat them.

52:30So it puts me in some interesting spots. I get very excited having to, you know, match up against people who are doing this for their entire lives. They're very well known and I get to just butt heads against them. So I've had some fun stories, you know, playing against phil helmuth for example who is a funny character but we've had a lot of tournaments we bust each other out um i still remember a couple years ago there was the 50 000 players championship so this event is not the main event of the world series which is you know 10 000 people play and put put 10k and and it's sort of like a nice uh lottery ticket this is a very different event this is just 100 people the top pros they play against each other They put 50 ,000 each.

53:19So it's a higher buy-in. Very few people can afford this level of buy-in. And they play a variety of games. So they didn't just play Texas Hold 'em. They play, you know, 10 different games, Omaha, Stud. You really have to be good at everything. So it's called the Players' Championship. And on day one, I'm sitting with, you know, they're all killers, right? Like there's no bad players in the field. But I'm sitting with Phil Helmuth. and a hand comes up where I think I played very correctly. I don't think I made any mistakes, but we ended up all in where he had a very, very good hand. He was very excited how you put the chips in.

53:58He had a set of deuces. He had flopped jack five deuce and he had two deuces, so he had three of a kind. And when we went all in, he was just so excited and sure that he was going to win. And I flip my hand over and he realizes that he's actually behind and he gets busted and loses the tournament. And he just sat on the rail instead of going home and just accepting that, you know, and let me like refresh for the next day. He spent maybe like 45 minutes just standing with the fans and just glaring at me straight like with this hate in his eyes. He couldn't get over the fact that I had busted him and he was so angry and upset about it.

54:39That he just gave me like the evil eye for 45 minutes. So that was, you know, a lot of people were laughing and making fun of him. But it was actually kind of nice to see that people care that much about results. Did you watch Molly's game? I have watched it, yeah. What did you think of it? Especially, and I want to kind of like think about the gambling aspect, which is very prevalent in, I mean, in Asia. a lot of, if I look at a lot of friends, women, whose father lost their entire, you know, family net worth, they had to downgrade house. It's a big problem. If I look at crypto, basically a 27, it's basically a 27 casino.

55:25Yeah. Where people, we talk about the crazy success stories, but actually there's many more people who get completely wrecked and lose everything and commit suicide. Yeah.

55:38What's your thought on that? And how much of the game, how much people are actually, because obviously you're talking about top 100 people, so people who are performing at a very high level, it's very different from gambling, but it's probably a kind of gambler in every one of us. Yeah, I think some people deal with, you know, the dopamine from gambling in a way that they get addicted to it and they lose sight or perspective, and there's people that can handle it. I'm definitely on the side of, I can manage it. I don't get sort of addicted in the gambling side. I've been around people that I've just been shocked at the levels to which they'll make bad decisions based on having this gambling rush.

56:21There was one guy, this is like when I decided I'm never gambling again. I was playing in Vegas in one of these years a long time ago. And this guy had come in from Greece and he had somehow gotten really lucky in some tournament. He got like second place or something in some tournament. He won$300 ,000, which, you know, I don't need to tell you, but if you're living in Greece, this is a lot of money. I mean, you can, you can live off it for a long time and do a lot of good. Later that night, we're in the casino. He's sitting at the blackjack table playing, you know, just messing around. And I think he lost like 5k, which is not fun, but okay.

57:01It's not the end of the world. He lost his mind. He started just doubling down, doubling down and not being willing to accept like a 5K loss, even though that day he had just made$300 ,000. So he starts going into this deep hole where he's just betting like 5K chips as if they're candy and just throwing them on the Aria blackjack table. They put him in the VIP room. They're calling for drinks. And this guy's like, he's just like so into it. He's losing, losing, losing. I think he goes down to like 10 ,000 from 300 ,000. He lost 290 ,000, goes down to 10 ,000. And here's the funny part. He starts getting on a hot streak.

57:42He bets, wins, bets, wins. And then he makes it almost all back. So like psychologically, this guy went from like losing it all to, you know, let's say he was back at like 280 or something. He couldn't stop. We were like dragging him. Like all his friends were just like, just pulling him in from the table. And he was just getting angry. Like, leave me alone. I'm like, you know, just let me do my thing. And then I saw the worst thing I ever saw in my life. He tells one of them, he says, go bet on roulette and, you know, put this on red. And the guy goes to the whole thing. Yeah, no, no, it was like maybe like 50 ,000.

58:19And he just like told him like, I'm gambling here. You go gamble for me over there. So, you know, there's a European roulette where there's like one zero. There's only one green number. So the odds of the house is one out of 37 because there's 37 numbers and one of them is green. It's like 3 % edge. So if you bet like$1 ,000, the house is going to win like$33, whatever. That's okay. In America, they have another kind of roulette called American roulette, where there's a zero and there's a double zero. So the house actually has double the edge and it's a way to fleece the customers faster. But this guy, he was in a high roller room.

58:57So they have the European one. He can bet on like the 3 % edge. And he tells the guy, no, I want you to go put this on the one with the double zero because it's luckier or something. Because like you have to, he had some theory about how, you know, you should go against the odds. So he just willingly gave up edge to bet on a double zero roulette. And of course lost and needless to say, like lost all his money that day. That was just so disgusting to watch. I mean, it was sad. it's imprinted in my head. Like I just, you know, I'll play gambling for fun, but just for the sake of it, I've seen how it can go really badly.

59:38What's the key learning there about the human brain? Yeah, I mean, some people really, you know, we're not adapted, going back to like the evolutionary psychology, we're not adapted to dealing with games of chance. It kind of lights up these weird parts of our brain and some of us can make really bad decisions. Is it because we don't want to believe that it's a chance? That it's luck? You know, the same as I will leverage long for a month and Bitcoin is going to go up and I'm going to make a lot and I'm going to think I'm amazing. But actually it was just luck. And I'm going to get wrecked. Yeah, I mean, people have superstitions.

1:00:14Everybody, like even top poker players, they'll think, oh, because I wore this hat, you know, or I have this shirt on. This is my lucky chip. And this is why I win tournaments. So they think that these things influence the chance when they don't. It's a way for us to always be looking for meaning when sometimes it's not there. It's just pure randomness. So you're playing poker professionally, but at some point, what happened? What happened after that? Yeah, I mean, at that point, I'd gone through that breakup, reached a low point where I just wanted to get into like a life that felt more fulfilling.

1:00:54And it wasn't so much about getting out of poker. It was more like finding something that felt like I was going in the right direction, going with sort of like the flow where the universe was telling me to go. So I did an MBA that was sort of like a year off to clear my head and think about what I wanted to do. Where was that? I was in Singapore the first time I came to Asia. It's a great school, great opportunity. I did my McKinsey interviews. I thought I was going to get back on that track, you know, because the university I went to, they don't even recruit out of there, like this McKinsey kind of people.

1:01:31And I thought, being a strategic thinker, I thought strategy consulting was what was suited for me. I went to an MBA school that they hire a ton of people out of. So I get to the end of it, and we do the interviews, and I show up. I prepared really hard for these case studies. They give you like, you know, you read like two pages about some company, and then you have to pretend you're a consultant and say what you would do. You would come into this company and you would do these studies and here's how you would act. So these like two German guys with like, you know, their suits and the nice fancy McKinsey, like beautiful hair, like very, very nicely done.

1:02:07They sit me down. We go through a couple of case studies and I'm just answering the questions. I'm treating it like the same I would as like a poker game. I'm just trying to do a good job and solve the game. So I get a call later that night because they tell you if you're getting through or not. And the guy calls me directly, like the McKinsey partner. And he says, hey, we spent a lot of time discussing you because we didn't know what to do. We went back and forth many times. The reality is you did the best out of everybody on the case study, but you don't seem like a consultant. You seem like a finance guy.

1:02:48You just don't have that. You remind me of all my friends that are in finance. That seems to be like more your type of personality. So we're not sure what to do, given that you can do the job, but it doesn't seem suited for you. So, you know, they were like, probably you should go do that instead. How did you take that? It actually gave me a lot of peace because I thought like, okay, I tried my best. And I did a good job at the actual task. but it's not where the universe is kind of calling me. It's saying like, don't go here. And meanwhile, I have all these hedge fund managers that are trying to hire me because they're saying like, oh, trading is like poker.

1:03:28You should do trading. And I was very resistant to the idea because I wanted to get away from the world of poker and it felt too similar. But in the end, I kind of gave in. I said, okay, you know, like I tried to go down this childhood dream of McKinsey, whatever, but it wasn't the right one. So you're going for a trading career? Yeah. In the traditional finance world? Traditional finance. Why are so many great poker players such good traders? It's definitely related to being able to think about expected value and being very process-oriented rather than, oh, look, I won. Oh, look, I lost. They're very much focused on, was this the right decision?

1:04:09What were the probabilities? Could I have done something better? this approach carries well extremely in the trading world. So what happened in this traditional trading career? It was funny. So I had a couple ways to go. I could do discretionary trading, which is what probably I'm best at. I think I have a very high natural talent at just making decisions and having a very good intuition. It's something I was born with. I chose the other path, which is systematic trading. So, you know, you make algorithms and I had no idea how to code, never coded in my life. I'm with all these like MIT computer science kids and, you know, they're very proficient at 10 languages and I'm just trying to piece together how to do Python.

1:04:56But the reason I was drawn and I decided to accept that path and that offer instead was because I was looking for the scalability where if you have code, you can just write 100 algorithms and you don't have to even be there. but if you're the one clicking the button, at some point, you're exchanging time for money. And funnily enough, the only thing I could bring to that world of systematic trading, because I don't know how to code. Yeah, I'm good at math, but not like in a machine learning formal sense. I haven't done like a machine learning PhD like some of these kids have. So if you're not going to quant, you're not going to developing, what the hell are you there for, right?

1:05:33Like you shouldn't be in that industry. and I found a niche where I was passably good at the math and passably good at the coding where I could at least understand what was going on and be able to get through it. And I had a skill that nobody else had, which was I actually had the trading intuition. And most people, they're either intuitive or they're systematic. And going into a systematic world with a lot of intuition, I could quickly find things that they were doing wrong, like simple things. Let's just say there's an algorithm that works really well Why not do double the size? Just size it up, right?

1:06:08Like you make twice the money. And they're not thinking about this stuff. They're just thinking how to optimize the R squared. So I found opportunities to increase P &L a lot in this world of systematic trading without being good at the actual zeros and ones of it. How don't you do that for? For forever. I mean, I've kind of grown through that career. I started as a individual trader. did that for you know a couple years at the first firm I was at which was you know a very successful large HFT firm then I moved to the competitor like the other really large HFT firm at that stage was a new team so it was kind of ground from the ground up there's no money there's no P &L you have to kind of build it so I got to see it what it's like to go from scratch and actually create everything because in the first one you know you're just kind of tweaking knobs everything's already nicely done.

1:07:02All the code is nice and clean. So I saw what it's like to do that. I was maybe like the number two sort of person on that team, but I wasn't the portfolio manager. And after a couple of years, I just thought, okay, like I should do this myself. I feel like it's like Eminem, you know, you have this, you know, you look yourself in the mirror and you have one opportunity and you just want to go for it. And at that time I was making over a million dollars a year. And going from that to just saying, fuck it, like, let me just go to zero and see if I can do it was, that was a moment where you have to believe in yourself.

1:07:37What made you take the leap? I just wanted this growth. What's the moment where you said, okay, now I'm just leaving this one million dollar a year to do this thing on my own? I started to have opinions about the organizational side, not just the trading side, but the, you know, we were hiring, we went from like having three people on the team to having 20 people. And people were leaving and like unhappy and the culture was a little bit messy. I learned, of course, that sometimes it's okay to like hire fast and then fire some people because you still end up in a good place. Like you'll get 10 people, six of them suck.

1:08:15But if you end up with four that are good, you know, at the end of the year, maybe you're in a good spot. So I learned some things, but I also didn't like the culture at all of what was going on. You know, all these math people but they're very like high ego and they're they're just very strong-headed about things and they're fighting with each other there was no direction so I thought I would be good good at that and that I would be good enough the trading where I could kind of bring both and I decided to kind of set up set up my own team what was that so this is 2016 2016 which is about six seven years ago, right?

1:08:55Yeah. So I was 32. It was a point in my life where

1:09:03you can start to try to push it to the next level. You know, I had enough money where I wasn't thinking about survival and that's very important. You know, when you're in survival mode and you're not sure how you're going to be able to pay for your rent, you know, for the rest of the year, that's a very different place. If you've made a few million, let's say, and you can think about what's the next step for you, then you can take a bit more risk. So how did this turn out for you? You know where I'm getting. You know exactly where I'm getting. Because you said, I mean, I'll get there. You said there is this train that you want to talk about.

1:09:38Okay, so when I started from complete scratch and being the one actually driving the team and doing a proper build out, I needed somebody who was really good at coding. So I had somebody that I was working with that was extremely experienced at building the coding stack. But even if you have a clear idea of what trades you want to do and that you've seen them before, you realize in a different code base, in a different environment, you can't reproduce the same things. Just like these little details matter and sometimes the same trade won't work. You have to adapt and just adapt to the country that you're in, the reality you're in.

1:10:13You have to look around and say, okay, what advantages are there here? What things might be restrictive? So you go from a place maybe where you had a lot of microwave towers sending data really fast and you can do some high-speed trades. And then when you lose that, you can't try to do the same trade. It's not going to work. You don't have the same advantages. So I kind of built up the first years where the main focus was just make P &L to be able to grow the team. And you end up doing different trades and trying out different things to see what can work. and had a few things going. And sort of by chance, I found this one trade where it really used my intuition.

1:10:56And it was a trade that I think nobody else could do as well because you really needed to piece information together from, let's say, eight different sources and merge them in a way that you can kind of predict, like, is it going to go up or down by taking these eight sources of information? So this was a futures trade, trading futures contracts. It's not like crypto where there's perpetuals and they keep rolling forever. These are calendar futures. Every three months, December, March, June, September, they expire and there's a new contract. So when there's like one week between the old contract and the new contract, it's called the role, the futures role.

1:11:41So this one week, there's a lot of people trying to move from the old contracts to the new contracts. and they have to kind of price the difference between the two. And I realized that I could sort of predict that price very well and how that price was moving, and I would use a variety of sources of information to do that. I'm not going to get into the details of how this is done because this is still available today.

1:12:09That's where people are disappointed. Yes. They're going to click stop. Okay, so continue, yeah. So this was a manual trade. It's going back to my roots of being very talented at discretionary trading. It's not something that you can tell the algorithm what to do because there's unique situations that you have to react to. And you don't know when they're going to happen. But at any time of day, 24 hours, because the market's open 23 hours, something might happen that might need you to sort of change direction. And you have to be in front of the screen. And that can happen in the evening, can happen in the morning, for the whole week.

1:12:43so for five days straight if I really wanted to do this perfectly and extract the full amount from this trade which would be? so this would be a million dollars in one week okay every quarter every quarter available still today available still today amazing okay there's a little bit of variance sometimes it's half a million sometimes it's two million but on average you know it's a very consistent thing if you're doing it properly I would have to like take naps in front of my computer, just put a pillow there and take like five minute naps, you know, every five, six hours and hope that nothing happened.

1:13:22And just have people call me if the market started moving and survive for a whole week. And this would be worth a million dollars. I basically had to accept destroying my health and not sleeping and feeling like shit for five days for a million dollars. And so basically you've done that four times a year for six years. So about$24 million, but there is no free lunch. Obviously the flip side is you don't sleep for five days or barely. And obviously you need time to recover from that. So it's not only these five days that you completely have a weird life and fuck yourself over. But afterwards, what's happening?

1:14:07I mean, the weekend is awful. The weekend after, you know, you're trying to fall asleep, but your body's not used to it. And it's just angry at you. And I don't actually do very well without sleep. I start, you know, breaking out and having just stomach aches and all kinds of issues. But there was a commitment I had where I felt guilty not extracting that value. I couldn't teach it to anybody else. It was something that I had to do myself. And ultimately, if I was wanting to make enough money to invest in the business so I could hire more people and keep growing, I saw it as a sacrifice that I had to make.

1:14:44How the hell do you stay awake for five days? It's rough. Not just stay awake, but also stay focused. This is where the years of chess helped out, just having to sit at a table. When I was playing some of these competitions, like the world chess under-18s and these things, They would put the games really early in the morning and I would be sleepless and have to just sit there all day. So I think I had a good amount of training compared to most people where I could do that. It was one of my superpowers, which I don't have anymore. I think if I tried to do this into like my 40s, I would have a harder time.

1:15:19How would you prepare for that? Because you know in advance, the exact dates where you have that. So kind of like an Ironman, you can prepare for it. So what did you do? First, I cut caffeine. no caffeine because I wanted to use that I wanted to have that sensitivity during that week so you could do caffeine for 3 months not 3 months but let's just say 2 weeks before, no caffeine so I go in I have a game plan, like day 1, day 2 day 3, I kind of know how to play it out like day 1 I know I'm going to feel good kind of taking it easy, I'm relaxed I know towards day 3 is when it gets really hard and that's where I kind of need some boosters, maybe some nootropics try to be smart maybe accept that I will need to take like one hour of rest at some point and get like but when you take one hour after three days you go immediately into deep sleep you're not just like having a nice nap you're like and you wake up and you feel like if something happens during that one hour does it fuck the entire one million or a small part or like what happens concretely small part usually like a couple hundred thousand but if you if you have a few of these events, you know, they add up.

1:16:31It's done, yeah. And honestly, I always had like at least one fuck up where, you know, it would be like 1.2, but then it was one. And I would get, you know, I would get angry at myself. I would say like, you know, you have to be perfectionist. I think from your personality, you can understand what I mean. Absolutely. And this is how you get high performance. You have to treat every small piece with, with a view towards perfection. Yeah. Every one person makes a difference. Absolutely. What's the craziest thing that happened during one of these weeks? that you remember? I mean, you know, there was one time where, um, there was an insane move in the market that hadn't happened in, you know, all the 10 years that had previously, uh, these roles had happened.

1:17:15It might've been, uh, on purpose or it might've been somebody just misclicked and they kind of ripped through, ripped through a book like crazy. So obviously the benefit of spending five days without sleeping is, uh, let's say$1 million. but what's the cost? What's the cost of not sleeping for five days? What's the life cost? And what's the health cost? And did you even, because you're so analytical, did you even think about, because we both know that the quality, how much you sleep is directly linked to how long you're going to live and longevity, right? Did you calculate? I know I'm basically, to get$1 million, this is how many days or weeks or months of life I'm kind of like giving up on?

1:18:02Well, first you're losing that week of life because you're literally not enjoying it. Like you're kind of becoming a robot. So you've already lost a week of your life and we don't have that many weeks. We don't have endless weeks of life. So you lost that week. Maybe you've potentially lost like another week of health. So it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that don't even have a million dollars. And if they could get that financial freedom, by not sleeping a week, of course they would do it. And I felt like I need to keep doing this even when I don't need the$1 million, you know, after five years of, because this is not the only trade I'm doing.

1:18:38I'm doing a lot of other trades that are also making money. But this was just a consistent thing where I felt I needed to keep extracting it because anybody would give up a week for a million dollars, like unless you're Elon Musk. And this year is the first year I decided I'm not even going to do it. I think my time and my week is more important than a million dollars. And it's the first time that I've allowed myself to just ignore it. So what's the point? What's the moment where you realize that one week is not worth a million dollars? Is it because you reached a certain number? Or is it because of another sort of enlightenment and understanding, like kind of bigger understanding about life and happiness?

1:19:24I would love to say it's, you know, bigger understanding, but it's mostly the first one. Because, you know, let's say, you know, going from one to two is a huge difference. Going from 20 to 21, still kind of, you know, 5 % still matters. There's a point at which you say, okay, I'm giving up something. How much is my time worth at this point? And I've spent a lot of time over the last decade making my time valuable. I really think about if I have a conversation with anybody, even with you right now, is this conversation worth$50 ,000? If not, I'm not going to have this conversation. I have to have that level.

1:20:01And I think, you know, it doesn't have to be - That's a great compliment. I don't have to be paid. You don't have to like bring out a stack of cash and pay me$50 ,000. But one of the ideas that I get from the conversation, either through organically talking with you or through some link that you're going to give me, oh, you should talk to this other person that ends up having a business deal that's worth a lot. Absolutely. I have this standard now for my time. And in a week, I can achieve a lot now. But from a utility perspective, you don't want to get too rich too quickly either. I've met a lot of billionaires in crypto, like Do Kwon, a lot of other famous ones.

1:20:38I've met probably all of them. If you become a billionaire at age 30, it kind of fucks with you. What the fuck do you do afterwards? Yeah. What's the point in life? What's the next thing you do? And that's the problem. They have to keep doubling down because they have to keep getting higher. They want the 10 billion. And then I know a few that got the 10 billion. They look at CZ or something. They're like, this guy is still above me. There's always someone better. And at some point they blow up. Is there a such thing as a number? like as one number where, I mean, we both know it's not the case because you just talked about that, but that's the weird thing.

1:21:15And it's more, once I made it financially, how do I move forward with my life?

1:21:24So if you're trying to retire and you have a plan, I know people who, you know, they just want to go fishing and live somewhere in the wild. It's very easy for them in a way like to achieve happiness. They can, you know, make 5 million. and then retire and live that life. And they will. And that's fine. That's fine. Some people are looking for that type of happiness. It brings them what they want. For me, I don't think about happiness. For me, I want to have the deeper satisfaction of achieving something that's very hard to do, that has impact on the world, potentially does good on the world. Not like this SPF bullshit, putting the signs up, like I'm in crypto for good.

1:22:01None of this kind of stuff. It's more of a journey of growth and personal growth. So satisfaction over happiness. Yeah. So it's almost looking at a much more micro view of progress and saying, okay, this is what I achieved today. I'm on the right track towards this big goal, but like actually reaching the goal is not the thing that's going to make me happy anyway. So I'm going to look at these smaller things, achieving them. So my satisfaction every day, this is what I've done every week or every month. And then once the goal is reached, probably the goal, you always push it a bit further and further.

1:22:34But as you said, and that's very kind of very wise. And it's also something I learned through, especially the last CryptoBall run. You don't want to make too much money too quick. And it's very counterintuitive. But because it fucks with your mind completely. And with your kind of sense of kind of self-worth. And then you basically lost. And I know a lot of people also probably didn't make billions. but like the first reflex was, I mean, the first result was, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing now in my life. I'm in my 20s or am I 30 years old? And I'm basically, what am I going to do? Am I going to travel for the next 50 years of my life?

1:23:14But who am I going to travel with? Everybody has a 9 to 5 or whatever, 9 to 8, or everybody's busy. You know, I even got during the crypto boomerang, and I have another company, Data Analytics, nothing to do with crypto. So, but you, you lose this, the perception of like what money is. And I mean, you lose sense with reality, basically completely touch with reality. And, uh, kind of nothing makes sense anymore. And if you lose your, the poem is you talked about retirement, but like for people who are very entrepreneurial, if you lose your drive, you have nothing, you have nothing left, especially at that age.

1:23:52Yeah. It's nonsense. I mean, people who retire at 65, they don't live very long after. If you retire at 80, that's sort of a lot better. For example, you're already, I don't know, I don't think I'll ever retire. I'll probably be like a Warren Buffett. And it's not about money. I just want growth and progression and getting better. And I think that you can lose IQ points. As you get older, you can become a little bit less quick at things, but you can make up for it through the knowledge and experience that you've gained. So you don't subscribe to the camp or theory that happiness comes from the little things in life.

1:24:31Basically, I should be just very content with my coffee or, you know, do you meditate? Do you do these things that make you kind of slow down and realize actually, you know, I kind of have achieved all these things. And we have a bunch of like really big people on this podcast. And I often talk about that. And some say, no, I'm fine. I'm, you know, I deserve all that stuff. But a lot say, I've been chasing these numbers all my life. And then once I get there, I realize that I come back full circle because what makes me happy is the same thing that I could have had and appreciated without this money.

1:25:01Yeah, I mean, I'm not chasing a number and I'm not chasing a specific title or a specific goal at this point. I'm very adaptive to the world. And I've put together a team that I think is like very world-class, the smartest people and very self-driven. And if we start tackling AI because we think that, you know, right now we should get out of trading, get out of crypto and do like a different problem. We should use our collective mind power to do that. We'll do that. It's not a fixed target. So we're never going to reach that target. We're always going to be trying to use our talent in a way that's positive.

1:25:35And that's a way that you keep the drive for forever.

1:25:41We have to talk about crypto a bit. one of the things I want to talk about is Solana because you said you were very right as you said before on a bunch of things right with Luna and a bunch of other things one of them one of the things you said I don't know if it was early this year or last year you said I think Solana is not going to reach back to the previous all time high my question is why do you think it won't reach previous all time high and kind of in a more generic way is how do you look at value in crypto? So there's two types of value. There is actual cash flow where you have a DeFi protocol like Maker.

1:26:24It's making X amount of money a year and you can try to put a P ratio on it and decide what's this value. This is like traditional value. Then you have money value, like monetary premium type of value, which I think is extremely poorly understood by not just people in crypto, but even in traditional markets or in the world. Very few people understand what money means and what does it mean to have value. It's such a poorly understood concept of why would a coin have value or not have this monetary value. And I'll say it's quite a serious thing. It has this very light, ironic, as Elon likes to say, you know aura around like a meme coin but we for me it's like slavery it's a serious topic and i'm not talking about just like recent you know african-american slavery just throughout you know history and egyptians and everything if people can force others to work all day for them and do what they want that's slavery right whether you're whipping them or whether they have to do it because they need food and you're the only one that can give them food they're doing it for their survival.

1:27:35And with these kind of like cryptocurrency instruments that we've created, the ones that are not backed by a cash flow and they're, you know, like treated as an alternative to the dollar or whatever. If somebody has 50 % of the supply of Solana, let's say, where it's very centrally held by, you know, a few funds that were like in very early and, you know, FTX estate at this point as well. If we actually ascribe value to those things, and let's say we, you know, Solana goes back to $250,$300, and it's worth$100 billion. We're giving 50 billion of value, which is the entire GDP of like large countries are, you know, like, not to talk about like a country like Cyprus, where I'm from, where it's not even near that.

1:28:24You can basically tell the population what to do for the entire year and just pay them a little bit of your Solana coins if we actually, as a society, agree that, yeah, it is worth$300. And it's not something to toy around with and just kind of make jokes about. There's people that will need to get that money to survive. There's limited resources in the world. And if we as a society decide that, you know, some random coin should be worth$100 billion, dollars, we're actually saying that the population of entire countries should work for the person who has it and who has it. It's not a fair launch in the sense of, you know, everybody has a little bit of Solana.

1:29:07It is extremely highly concentrated in a few hands of people that have maybe like the media, social media presence to pump it, or maybe just have like, you know, the insider presence. so your thesis is less i don't think it will reach this price but i don't agree with the kind of philosophical aspect or side of it well or both both so in order to be able to sustain that price it means that society has accepted that this thing we're all willing to work for so i'm like you need to get out of bed and say like gotta get my 100 sold today like you know I got to chase that. And there's people who do that with Bitcoin.

1:29:49They're very fanatic about it. And I would say Bitcoin is a little bit separate from the others in the sense of, it was created for that purpose, philosophically by the founder. It was created as an alternative that people would work for. It has this first mover advantage. It has the sort of the aura around Satoshi, around the origin story that gives it some credibility as neutrality. You need this neutrality in order to have something have value. The value comes from society and agreeing with each other. If something is not neutral, neutral means like, was there a presale where somebody, some VCs got in, other people didn't get in?

1:30:33Was there something unfair about it? Or is it neutral? Definitely.

1:30:42what would 39 years old Jordy tell 19 years old Jordy if you met him today definitely the first thing would would be around deconstructing the ego sometimes to be able to have a healthy balanced ego that we've talked about you have to break down what's there and it's a little bit painful it's uncomfortable because your self-identity is tied up with you know, this person that you think other people see you as and where your value lies, you know, for a girl it could be like people tell her she's pretty and her value is intertwined with this belief or could be that you're smart and then you kind of attach to that.

1:31:21It could be around like your family. Your family is like a well-known family and you kind of, you like that aspect of it and attach it to your ego. I would tell myself just accept like, being nothing, accepting at a low level and just build in a very solid foundation where you kind of go step by step. You're not trying to be insecure and get ahead of yourself and show off to people that, oh, I can do this and whatever. Just be humble. Start from accepting that you will get better over time. You can kind of get there in steps and it's a much more solid way to build for the future. Yeah, so basically you're playing the game of life with yourself and the only thing that should matter is am I better today than yesterday but not compare you comparing yourself to others yeah one way or another yeah definitely like you can compare yourself to others to understand yourself better and get to know okay I seem to be you know naturally better at this kind of stuff but then this is not my type of thing so it's good to have that self-awareness but the the main thing is just not being you know attached to your sense of self in your brain and this like noise in your brain.

1:32:35You know, I used to have like, I would try to go to sleep and lie down at night and I couldn't sleep because I would just, you know, be thinking that, oh, there'll be a voice talking to me in my brain, right? I don't know if you have this, the voice in the brain talking to you. No, the only thing I had at night was it would be completely dark. I would put my cover above me and I would just like close my eyes, but it was dark already anyway. Stop breathing and be like, this is how it feels to be there basically. Okay. so kind of weird but not the same I mean I think most people as they develop there's like a story being told to themselves about their reality and what's happening and you know just making sense of their world right and we sort of become a third character like we're just watching ourselves and there's two there's two of us there's the us that is actually like living and doing things and there's the observer what I kind of got through through meditation and like a lot of years was that we are actually the observer and you just need to align the observer with your actions and your reality the other stuff is like fake the other stuff cannot lead you to a full fulfilled life and happiness yeah you get jealous you get upset you know you're in you're you're fighting with people, you're taking things personally.

1:34:00I still sometimes will take things personally. It's like Michael Jordan. You want to use it as motivation sometimes if somebody doesn't believe in you, you kind of want to prove them right and that's okay if it's done within a boundary of control. It's under a certain limit. The breakup is a good example for that actually. How do I use the breakup especially if she breaks up with me as a way to fuel kind of my my future and become a bit the better or the best version of myself so one day she would almost regret breaking up with me yeah I mean that's that's kind of true like in a way it all comes down to being able to have value if you want to get respect if you want to get resources if you want to achieve things you just improve yourself make yourself better the rest sort of comes naturally.

1:34:53I went from wanting to have a Lambo so that I could show off and try to have the status that I was seeking, the social status. Have you ever had one? No, I just flew from wanting to have it and then when I could have it and it wouldn't be a mistake to buy it, I just don't crave it anymore. I might want to rent it for a weekend just to have fun, but I don't need to own this thing. I don't need to make the pictures to post on social media to show, hey, I have a Lambo, which I don't have, but I could have.

1:35:26so you're pretty active on social media actually just for this podcast the other day you generously posted about the fact that we would record and uh i saw i mean you have really sticky community even during a bear market like a lot of reactions from people very excited which made me also very excited and which is going to force us to release this podcast next week why do you do all these social media stuff? It's given me a lot of like satisfaction, this like inner satisfaction, being able to try to bring an authentic voice and say things how I see them and how they are. And I think I have some unique perspectives that I don't hear other people talking about.

1:36:06So I do kind of bring something to the table that's not already there. And I love the people that follow me on the different social media channels because I've attracted a certain type of talent that, you know, these are very smart people. They don't like shitposts under my tweets. They're very nice and very thoughtful people. I've met a lot of them in person. And it's just amazing to meet this high caliber of people. And, you know, the content that I put out and the things I talk about, it's not for everybody. I can't like talk to like the entire spectrum of society. I do try to make it a little bit wide.

1:36:42So I use memes a lot. I think memes are just part of life. Like you can be very, you know, German philosophical and say like, no, you should just, you know, be correct and do everything properly. But, you know, people have short attention spans. Sometimes you have to get their attention with an image or like a catchy quote. And you can have something to say very important behind it. But it just like has this extra punch because not everybody's going to read an entire book or, you know, go through like a 10 ,000 word blog. so ultimately I'm hoping to bring a little bit of memeness a little bit of fun but add my contribution to both you know the lessons that I'm learning through life and the reason why I tweeted about this podcast I'm excited to do it I'm like in the trenches every day right now I'm I'm pushing 120 percent where I'm out of my comfort zone constantly keep pushing keep pushing I don't really have a lot of chance to like reflect and talk about what I've been discovering by being in the trenches all day.

1:37:44And I love the idea of just once a while, a couple of times a year, step back and reflect. And so this is what we're doing. That's actually the goal of this podcast. I was just thinking, we have all these podcasts already in crypto about, you know, what's the next 100x coin or like all these very technical things. But at the end of the day, even if you have a bored ape or a crypto punk on Twitter has a profile picture and you post a million or two million daily PNL, you're a human being. I mean, all of the media is a game, not just social media. You have traditional news outlets like Fox News and all these things.

1:38:19And if they manage to get attention through the right word by, you know, they use a lot of bad things happening in the world to get attention or anger and try to get people to look at a story in a way that will make them emotionally react to make them sticky customers. They're doing their game for their fight for attention and trying to present their story, which can sometimes be, you know, not very mainstream, but they can make it mainstream by going that way. And crypto has this same image problem now where we're sort of being presented as criminals. They're bad people. They're trying to, you know, do all this shady stuff.

1:38:56And there is some of that obviously happening. But there's a lot of people that actually care and want to do good for both the monetary system and also for individuals' lives. And yeah, we have to fight for that attention. Absolutely. And not be seen only as crypto bros or nerds, but also as normal people. because that's how you attract the masses. Where do you think the human species is going to end, especially with the advancement of AI where we've seen massive breakthrough and progress in the last year? Yeah, it's been very sudden. I think we're reaching this exponential chart on AI where it starts to improve itself very fast.

1:39:41And it might not be in the next couple of years, but I would say around the end of the decade, I would expect that certain things about how we live our lives are going to change such a fundamental way that a lot of people will not be prepared for it. And, you know, if you have some AGI, general intelligence that can take a lot of people's work and just do it better than them, or even potentially give a lot of power to the people who are in charge of the companies or the code, and create these superhumans that are able to control AI, while the rest of us plebs, I mean, hopefully we're gonna be on the other side of that funnel, who knows?

1:40:24But the imbalances between the more powerful people and the more base people can get really extreme. And it's something we've already had in a capitalist society, the CEO of McDonald's versus the worker, we see this ratio 100 times, 400 times sort of goes up. In a world where AI creates so much automation and intelligence, the few people that will have control over that will start to have some interesting ethical decisions to make as well. Because it's not just like, you know, let's do UBI and throw money at people. I worry that something that's under-discussed is what happens when there's such a huge gap where the difference between you know person a and person b becomes bigger than you know person b and like a pet where you know we love our pets we want to treat them well but their consciousness level and their abilities is that is at a different level playing field and if you have some companies that are developing the level of intelligence that we're looking at seeing, it's going to bring a lot of ethical problems.

1:41:42How do you prevent that from happening? Because on one hand, and also linked to crypto, you know, you need to be careful with the regulation because you want innovation to happen. But again, how do you prevent from person A to person B being even further than person B to a pet? I think unfortunately some of these things are inevitable it's going to happen the progress of technology

1:42:15it's hard to imagine exactly how it plays out because there's different companies there's different countries there's obviously frontrunners right now with like open AI at some point I think national intelligence agencies started getting involved in the AI rights just like they did during the Cold War So it becomes an issue for national security and they start interfering and wanting to be on top of all the developments once they get to that level. I think we're only a few years away from countries like city states being involved. Probably in China, they're already involved. It's hard to know exactly what's happening there.

1:42:52But because it's an arm race, it's hard to stop it. So we have to think about like, what's the value of a human life? like what if it's a human life that you know doesn't have anything to contribute to capitalist society anymore because a capitalist society is sort of built on this premise that you know some people are cutting wood and some people are working in an office and we're all putting all this stuff together as a society makes sense and if someone is not contributing at all yeah if you have extra resources we'll you know we'll give them something some welfare but in a world where It's like that to the extreme.

1:43:30We haven't thought about that. And this makes the assumption that the people who make these decisions at the country level even understand what's happening. But when you look at politicians, just when you look at social media, you know, Facebook and you look at the Congress and the type of people who are supposed to make some decisions that they don't even understand anything about. And we're just talking about Facebook and data. We're not talking about AI, right? Yeah. The only thing people understand is money. These people will understand incentives. So once this level of wealth, which is already, I mean, we're seeing these valuations like OpenAI, 90 billion, even that's probably going to be lower than where we're going to start seeing these AnthropInc and all these other companies.

1:44:18The level of wealth that is going to get created now has never been seen in history before. And it can happen very suddenly where trillions of dollars get created by somebody who makes the next advancement. And that will sway politicians. It will sway countries. It goes back to this concept of if you have that much wealth, people in essence are your slaves because they're working all day trying to get some of what you have. And as a capitalist society or even a non-capitalist society, we have to think through what we want the end game to be. What do you think it is? I think ultimately the U.S.

1:45:04government will start having a lot of control because a lot of the developments are happening there right now. Most of the companies are based there. And yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if we end up in a sort of Russia, USSR, U.S. part two, but with much higher stakes. so despite not we didn't talk about that today but despite not being very bullish on the u.s you still think that they're gonna win this race so i mean you know the u.s i feel like as a as a society the coherence of the people is falling apart there's just more crime when people are not having resources i don't blame them like they are so frustrated at the system they're angry at the system even if they do stupid things you know when i was living in San Francisco, they would throw rocks at the Google bus.

1:45:57And it's just some normal people inside the bus trying to go to work, but they would express their anger at the big tech that was gentrifying and making things more expensive by attacking the Google bus. These types of things will keep progressing. And the US is at the stage where we're seeing more and more of that. There's a lot of societal discontent around wealth and the imbalances, and that will only keep getting worse. At the same time, at the high level, they still have a lot of power with the technology and the innovation is mainly happening there. Amazing, man. Thank you so much for doing this.

1:46:35Thanks. That was amazing. I hope you had fun. Had a lot of fun. We'll do it again. Absolutely. We'll do it again. Hopefully when the crypto market is a bit less boring. but the most important is we are always at the top of ourselves doing a bear market doing a bull market and to make things move and make things happen yeah let's keep trying to think forward improve things and get better both for ourselves and the people around us amazing thank you so much for doing this thanks