How to (Actually) Win in Crypto w/ Jez

Summary

Highlights

• Jez shares his transition from being a gamer to a crypto trader, emphasizing the skills crossover. 🎮➡️📈
• His early days of trading rare virtual items set the stage for his entry into crypto markets. 💡
• Jez's 'full port' tactic is all about confidence and high conviction trades. 📊
• He candidly discusses past mistakes, including leveraging too heavily and bouncing back. ⚖️
• The importance of adapting to new market trends, like AI, while retaining core trading principles. 🤖

Key Takeaways

• Jez emphasizes finding your crypto 'tribe' for a stronger journey. 👥
• Identifying your edge in crypto trading is crucial. Know where you excel. 🎯
• Be prepared to pivot your strategies as the market evolves. 🔄
• Understanding founder intuition can guide investment decisions. 🧠
• Stay resilient through setbacks; perseverance is key in crypto. 🔥

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to the Podcast and Guest The podcast 'Crypto Market Wizards' is introduced by the host, Tyy, who welcomes the guest, Jez. Tyy requests Jez to provide a brief history of how he got into cryptocurrency and what he is currently doing. Jez indicates that his involvement with cryptocurrency began with his history as a massive gamer, which serves as the foundation for his journey into the crypto space.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Jez's Background in Gaming The chapter discusses Jez's background in gaming, focusing on his competitive experience with the game Team Fortress 2. Jez reached semi-competitive levels while playing the game, which was developed by Valve. During his time playing, Valve introduced a significant update known as the 'loot box update.' This update brought the concept of loot boxes to Western audiences, allowing players to acquire crates through gameplay. These crates could be opened with keys purchased with real money, offering rare and desirable items.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Introduction to Trading through Gaming In the chapter titled 'Introduction to Trading through Gaming,' the author recounts the early days of in-game item trading, emphasizing how virtual items began garnering real-world monetary value as early as 2008-2009. The anecdote highlights a notable instance where a virtual hat was sold for $3,000, shocking online forums. This early exposure to trading led the author, still in high school at the time, to shift focus from gaming to trading, engaging in extensive day trading activities, often staying up till 3 a.m. to manage and clear inventory.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Transition to Options and Crypto The chapter transitions from traditional career approaches to exploring financial opportunities in options and cryptocurrency. The speaker shares a personal anecdote, recalling an experience where they successfully turned a $50 gift card into several thousand dollars through trading. This opportunity was not only profitable but also pivotal, as it shifted their interest from playing games to engaging in market making and trading, indicating a burgeoning passion for financial markets at an early age.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Experiences and Career in Crypto The speaker shares their journey into the world of options trading, influenced by their interest in market dynamics and online trading forums like Wall Street Bets. They began with options trading due to the appealing volatility but faced challenges due to the 30-day pre-clearance requirement, which restricted their ability to make timely adjustments. This limitation encouraged them to explore alternative asset classes that offered more flexible trading conditions.
• 05:30 - 08:00: Jez's Viral Article and Key Takeaways The chapter titled 'Jez's Viral Article and Key Takeaways' dives into the author's introduction to the world of cryptocurrency, coinciding with the infamous DAO hack. The author reflects on their prior engagement with Eve Online battle post-mortems, drawing parallels between the communal analysis of events in both realms. The narrative draws upon their comprehensive reads on forums like 4chan, focusing on dissecting both digital worlds and the critical incidents that shape them. This chapter sets up a discourse on understanding complex events through dedicated fact-finding and retrospection.
• 08:00 - 12:00: Finding Success in Crypto The chapter titled "Finding Success in Crypto" draws a parallel between political battles and the hack of a major cryptocurrency, likening it to a strategic game. The speaker shared their journey in entering the cryptocurrency world, highlighting the joining of Standard as a partner in 2022 as a pivotal and educational experience. The narrative demonstrates the speaker's admiration and takeaways from mentors like Al Locan Adam, and references participating in a high-profile deal.
• 12:00 - 15:30: Example of Good New Thing in Crypto Blast T is recognized as an amazing entrepreneur.
• 15:30 - 20:30: Foundation of Founder Intuition in Crypto The chapter titled 'Foundation of Founder Intuition in Crypto' discusses an individual's experience of joining the crypto industry full-time in 2022, during a bear market. The individual emphasizes the importance of preserving capital and making high conviction trades. The chapter also highlights a viral piece authored by the individual, which serves as a guide on mastering success in the crypto landscape, likened to a massive multiplayer online (MMO) game. Key takeaways from this journey and guide are expected to be discussed.
• 20:30 - 25:30: Strategies and Convictions in Trading The chapter focuses on the foundational strategies and principles essential for success in cryptocurrency trading. It emphasizes the significance of approaching the market with a well-structured plan and highlights the importance of having a clear understanding of one's initial resources, likened to a 'bankroll.' The discussion suggests that beginners often start from scratch, without connections or prior knowledge, and thus should pay close attention to the sequence of actions outlined in the related article.
• 25:30 - 29:00: Sizing, Leverage, and Lessons Learned The chapter titled 'Sizing, Leverage, and Lessons Learned' begins with the emphasis on the importance of finding a community or network. The author reflects on a tweet they made while writing an article, noting that when they first entered the space in early 2018 to mid-2019, their timing wasn't ideal. They were fully invested with their capital but spent the initial two to three years essentially working alone as a solo player. This setup the stage for discussing the sizing, leverage, and the critical lessons they learned during this period.
• 29:00 - 35:00: Strategies in Difficult Times This chapter discusses the realization that having a good education, experience, and technical knowledge does not automatically lead to success. It emphasizes the importance of external perspectives and trusting feedback from others to recognize and correct mistakes. The chapter highlights a personal story where the pivotal change came through the insights shared by a trusted friend.
• 35:00 - 41:00: Thoughts on AI Meta and Innovation In the chapter titled 'Thoughts on AI Meta and Innovation', the speaker reflects on their initial skepticism about Automated Market Makers (AMMs), particularly stable swap AMMs, around late 2019 when platforms like Curve were emerging. Coming from a traditional finance (tradfi) background, they were initially critical of AMMs due to concerns about issues like impermanent loss and the role of market makers. However, they describe a pivotal discussion where someone explained the incentives and mechanics of stable swaps, which led to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the innovation within the DeFi space.
• 41:00 - 53:30: Survivor Bias and Trading Strategies This chapter discusses the significance of understanding stable coins in trading without incurring impermanent losses, either through liquidity pooling (LP) or trading. The narrator realizes these strategies with external guidance, which expedited their learning process. The key advice is to collaborate with others and identify and leverage one's strengths or 'edge' in trading.
• 53:30 - 60:00: Jez's Poker Experience The chapter discusses Jez's experiences with poker, emphasizing the importance of identifying one's 'Edge' and sticking to it. Jez notes that most of their gains have come from focusing on their strengths, while losses often result from straying, such as trying leverage trading. The chapter also highlights the need for adapting one's style as they progress, warning against the pitfalls of repeating the same strategies without adjustment.
• 60:00 - 79:00: Final Words and Advice The final chapter emphasizes the high-risk, high-reward nature of the 'trenches style' game in trading. Once success is achieved, it advises against continuing to take excessive risks. The importance of finding one's edge in the crypto world through experimentation is highlighted, recognizing that newcomers should try different approaches to discover their strengths. Various types of traders, including 'Trench Warriors' and 'New Thing Hunters,' are discussed, hinting at the diverse strategies and roles in trading.

How to (Actually) Win in Crypto w/ Jez Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 what's up everyone tyy here and welcome to the crypto Market Wizards podcast today I'm joined by jez how are you doing today hey doing well thanks for having me on yeah so I think a lot of people know who you are but for those that don't can you give a brief history on how you got into crypto and what you do now yeah happy to um I think one you know in in the context of the article that I wrote I think it might be helpful to start my history with gaming because that's sort of where all of this has started um I used to be a massive gamer
• 00:30 - 01:00 there was a game called Team Fortress 2 that I had sort of like hit semi competitive Heights at uh and while I was playing this game somewhat competitively uh valve you know before they they went into their publisher Arc um released an update called the loot box update which uh essentially introduced loot boxes to Western audiences these were crates that you got through playing and then you could buy keys with money those keys could open the crates you could get rare items these items were rare enough and desired
• 01:00 - 01:30 enough that people actually started spending real dollars um to buy them and equip them as Cosmetics this was like 2008 2009 so very early I remember somebody bought a hat for $3,000 and all of the Forum boards were like oh my gosh like wow what a sale um and I quickly stopped playing the actual game and I just started trading like I was in high school I would just stay up until 3:00 a.m. I was a day trader I wanted to clear my inventory before I went to bed at 3:00 a.m.
• 01:30 - 02:00 um and so I would just flip these things uh and I remember I flipped like maybe like a $50 like gift card credit card that you could swipe onto the thing into a few thousand dollars um and I had this you know I I think that was a very lucky experience for me not only because I I was it was profitable but at that age having that experience and being able to look at it and say excuse me oh like I stopped playing the actual game and I was clearly more interested in the market making and the trading of it like
• 02:00 - 02:30 that says something about me anyway so I got interested in options I started trading options because we were Market Mak I was reading Wall Street bets um I started trading options it sort of provided the volatility that I was looking for but one difficult thing with trading options was 30-day pre- clearances um very difficult to trade options if you have to hold them for 30 days you can't adjust at all uh and so that sort of drove me to look for alternative you know asset classes that I could participate in without restrictions
• 02:30 - 03:00 um and that landed me on crypto right around the time that the Eve on uh not the Eve online that landed me on crypto right around the time that the Dow hack happened um and so I started reading about crypto and I was reading about this Dow hack and if you've ever read um Eve online um historical battle post-mortems there there are a bunch of these across the internet usually on forchain or whatever but it's somebody who's taken the time to find the sides and do a postmortem of these were the
• 03:00 - 03:30 spies and these were the you know the Nuance or whatever of this political battle and here's how it went down when when you read the Dow hack article it it read very similarly to an Eve online political battle um and I was like oh you know that's a game people are clearly playing this game and having a lot of fun I want to go see what that game is about in 2022 I joined standard as a partner that was one of the best experiences I've learned so much from from Al locan Adam uh probably the highest profile deal that I
• 03:30 - 04:00 led that you that you would know is blast T is an amazing entrepreneur um and then earlier this year uh sort of saw the tides shifting and you know there were a couple of experiences that sort of informed this decision but um decided that I I could have more impact as a high value uh Angel adviser in the space um versus being sort of restricted to larger VC checks it it changes the shape of of of what you can participate in got it okay
• 04:00 - 04:30 so I guess you joined crypto full-time 2022 like during the bare Market uh so you know hopefully you're able to like preserve capital and just size in uh and play like some you know High conviction trades yeah so recently you had this piece that went pretty viral um and it kind of goes over I guess your journey um how to I guess Master how to win in crypto a starter guide to the crypto MMO um and you kind of talk about a few important takeaways here um can you just
• 04:30 - 05:00 briefly talk about high level um like the main ways to be successful in crypto and then we can kind of dive deeper um after you touch on the high higher level points yeah so I think the order in which I presented My article is pretty important um I think to people let's say you're just completely starting from scratch you're coming in with you know your bankroll um which is essentially your level in this analogy um and you don't know anybody um I think far in way
• 05:00 - 05:30 the most important thing is to find your people uh when I I I actually made a tweet about this while I was writing the article but when I look back I I I was in this space I entered this space essentially with all of my Capital by early 2018 mid 2019 my timing was not that great on my first entry I spent the first three years two to three years essentially as was solo player I thought
• 05:30 - 06:00 you know hey I've got a good education I've got all this trafi experience I've got I've got computer background I understand how these things work better than most I can be successful that did for the largely did not work out for me um and it actually took exposure from people who I trusted for me to realize where I was going wrong um you know one of the most pivotal things that I had was a very good friend of mine still is um
• 06:00 - 06:30 walked me through uh stable swap amms uh I think this was late 2019 um curve had probably just come out uh because my whole thing was you know I was EXT trafi I hated amm because I'm like H short gamma impermanent loss these things are just you know I I'd missed the forest for the trees in terms of incentivization and not needing to get like Market maker listings I emissions like impermanent loss and then this guy was helpful enough to walk me through stable swaps and hey there's all these
• 06:30 - 07:00 different stable coins going around and you don't take any impermanent loss when you either LP them or when when you trade through them um and that was one of the first times that a lot of this stuff started to click um and it took an external voice you know what I mean I maybe I would have come up with that Discovery but it might have taken me another year and a half um and so the number one thing is group up uh the number two thing I think in in presentation order is find what you're good at find your Edge and try to stick
• 07:00 - 07:30 to that I've found most of my gains have come from what I've identified as my Edge good new thing hunting and I found that most of my losses have come when I've strayed away from that edge specifically you know trying to leverage trade um finally is uh I would say the third takeaway that I want someone who's just starting out to understand is that as you progress in this game you need to change your style I've watched too many people sort of like climb out of the trenches only to fall back in by repeating the same style and what you
• 07:30 - 08:00 have to understand is the trenches style is a very highrisk high reward game and that you know playing it until you make it out but once you've made it out I don't think there's any reason to take a lot of those trade-offs um going forward got it yeah so one thing you said is finding your Edge and I think you know if you're nearer to crypto I think you kind of have to experiment here there and see what you're good at um you talk about you know Traders uh trench Warriors good new thing Hunter and I
• 08:00 - 08:30 guess leverage trading or this meme uh like meme Lords you mentioned you're good at good new things a good new thing Hunter can you go over like like like an example of finding a good new thing that the market didn't see and walk through your there I'm goingon to avoid the obvious which was you know hyper liquid which had yeah fairly long and surprisingly faded farming period um during especially the spot ecosystem was just completely slept on um in my opinion
• 08:30 - 09:00 um I think perhaps a cleaner example of a good new thing would be robbit in 20123 um setting the picture for 2023 robit being a good new thing um we had just basically like entered a bare Market FTX had blown up end of 2022 oftentimes what happens when you enter bare markets and periods of compressed volatility is people search for higher synthetic volatility that would like for example 100x leverage was invented in 2018 bear or one of those
• 09:00 - 09:30 bears by bitmax um just when volatility compresses people take more leverage um going into 2023 bear there was a new per exchange uh which if you know PE it really started to get discovered December 20122 um robit implemented their per exchange with a a very very high leverage THX leverage and and a really strong Innovation actually the asymmetric VPO so you have this good new thing it's a good new trading exchange
• 09:30 - 10:00 if you played on R bit you know back in those early days before everyone really realized how predatory some of the asymmetric fpnl was um and before some of the the trust concerns over a robit were Amplified um it was an good new thing it allowed for new sort of uh directional views new directional views much higher leverage directional views it felt amazing in terms of like zero slippage entry uh and specifically you know I sort of bring out a checklist um
• 10:00 - 10:30 it had some other benefits it was very high friction so it was at the time um in a very small liquidity pool on salana and salana was not you know attractive in early 2023 and so that was a huge barrier to entry I remember when I was going around and I was showing people the pers platform and I was explaining the thesis so many times people would be like oh that's cool but like I'm just can't be asked to like like it was too high function for them to figure you
• 10:30 - 11:00 know back in the day you had to do the advanced Wormhole portal and then you just ended up un soulle and people weren't as familiar with jup and and the whole ecosystem so it was fairly High friction um and so that sort of thing allows for your entry uh to be correct um and then the third thing is is there a flywheel is there a reason why this thing is going to like gain more exposure in the future in this case it was just obviously pretty much a good product a good exchange it was clear that people would probably end up on it more um and so that was I think a very
• 11:00 - 11:30 clean example R bit like two cents to 20 cents of here's a good new thing it's you know worth 50 million on salana right now this is a exchange that's competing with the best of them it should be worth more and and and taking an entry there's one thing that I didn't put in this list because I thought it was kind of too advanced of a topic for the article that I was writing but I think for for this for the purpose of this interview I'd actually really like to go through it um and it's it's
• 11:30 - 12:00 intuition um specifically it's founder intuition it's it's what does the protocol founder want here and and then an addendum is do they have the levers to make that happen um and I I'll use two examples both I'll use robit and I'll use hyper liquid as sort of examples of reading through founder Intuition or at least how I how I played it um robit 2023 you had this thing where they had this massively profitable
• 12:00 - 12:30 Casino um you know how profitable how the statistics that's debatable but it's undeniable that people were depositing money and robit losing it on the purpose platform I was losing money on the purpose platform and losing it cross- selling into the into the gambling um what do what does robit want like like put yourself in the robit founder shoes they're sitting on a Golden Goose right they've just got this cash flow God it's just bringing free free money
• 12:30 - 13:00 will it exist in 10 years I don't know that's a pretty open question right like one of my biggest fears while I was holding that position was you're just terrified of every day waking up to a doj like this domain has been seized logo yeah um will it last 10 years I don't know can they sell equity in it traditionally no you can't sell traditional Casino Equity because of the risk of of it imploding people just there's no secondary market for that but they already had a live token trading on salana and it was trading at 50 million when they were clearly making it was I
• 13:00 - 13:30 think at the time we started it they were making like 300 or 400 million a year um and it's like okay well if they do anything then they can increase the price of this token and if you put yourself in the founder shoes what's the okay you're the founder of robit you want to make the most money possible which is generally outside of like people like Jeff generally a pretty good framing of founder intuition I want to make the most money how do the founders of robit make the most money in that case it's clear they get the market to price
• 13:30 - 14:00 their token as equity and then they sell out their Equity so they can capture 5 10 years of cash flow through the equity valuation and now they've essentially ran it for another 10 years um and so all of the product Sprint of you know buy and burn move to ethereum buy and burn all these things coming out um was very was to me I was like okay this is they want the token to go up so that they can sell it so they can you know realize the equity in their Golden Goose um founders intuition was that play uh
• 14:00 - 14:30 let's take another example of hyper liquid Jeff puts out perr launches spot ecosystem and he puts out perr for the first two weeks with no information it was just you know here's perr I think it launched at like eight cents it traded eight cents for four or five days that was when I built most of my position founder intuition here's Jeff he's a very sharp he's a very thoughtful guy what is he doing launching a random spot mcoin clearly this has intentional behind it and if you take one step back
• 14:30 - 15:00 you're like okay how does hyper liquid onboard users hyper liquid is a closed closed ecosystem right users have to bridge over there and create an account to become onboarded and then once they've got you onboarded now you're now you're hopefully a valuable user and when they look at their own history when I look at my history I unboarded onto hyper liquid because of differentiated assets that hyper liquid had that I couldn't trade anywhere else this was November 23 I wanted to short friend Tech um hyper friend I that was a good I I yeah good one I think I think I nailed
• 15:00 - 15:30 the frch in terms of like finding the pmf on its runup and then and then realizing where that sort of pmf didn't extend um but so that was when I onboarded on to them and so you're were like okay well clearly the best way for them to create differentiated assets is to create native assets and so if you viewed per as and I don't think it ever really worked in the way that like if you had told me when I bought per at 8 cents that it would get spot points and it would get all of these like Tailwinds
• 15:30 - 16:00 I would have said it would have traded 60 cents before the launch and then that that never quite happened um but it was essentially okay here he here he is launching a spot asset this spot asset going up is the best thing for hyper liquid it creates fomo to sign up for hyper liquid to buy an asset that you can't buy anywhere else it creates wealth effect Jeff wants this token to go up so I will buy does that make sense it's it's founder do they want it happen and do they have the lever in which RIT and
• 16:00 - 16:30 Hyper liquid both had the levers to to to make it happen yeah and this is one thing I also learned through the years you kind of one of long tokens where the F where like the team is also incentivized to pump it as well um I learned a hard lesson by longing defi coins in like the past year and a half where yes I mean the fundamentals might be great but the team because they're getting Su or because they're worried about regulatory things like they're not going to pump the token whereas things that that too right there they've
• 16:30 - 17:00 already made it yeah yeah I guess you also want to look for Founders that haven't made it yet so they're P their path to make it is by pumping the token uh so in the case of robit I mean yeah like you know the team wants to pump the token um and when when per first launch not hyper good I was kind of confused I'm like what is this catcoin um and I kind of faded it I think I sold fairly early but I guess looking back it's like yeah like they were incentivized to bring more attention to it therefore it makes sense for you to long it even if you don't have like perfect information
• 17:00 - 17:30 um and given your style is good good new thing hunting right uh it sounds like you want to look for gems before their consensus um one question I had from the audience is given your style like one bad thing about being contrarian or fairly contrarian is the market will disagree with you for short or medium uh term right um that you might be holding a bag that's like just going sideways or underperforming um how do you I guess first of all deal with that and second when do you decide that okay like the
• 17:30 - 18:00 market will never care about this let me cut my bags so can you like talk about your mentality there yeah so I think part of the part of that is why it's so important to have high conviction um without high conviction and this is why I can't you know I I'm not a meme Trader I've been in position to be I I many times I've had amazing positions to hold memes you know I had 8% of Bitcoin I had 2% of goat um but but I don't really have conviction in those things I can't
• 18:00 - 18:30 see the founders intuition I can't read through how they're going to behave I can't rely on sort of more fundamental Tailwinds so to say um and so when when those things go down 10 20% I'm just like a normie right I get shaken out um and that's happens to me sort of over and over to the point where uh it's hard for me to actually buy meme coins now because I know I'm not going to really be able to with I've seen too many death coasters right I've seen too many death
• 18:30 - 19:00 coaster charts so when a chart starts going down I'm like oh okay that that that's it um and then and then it goes you know 10x higher um so I think part of it is having high conviction and ultimately being right you know we don't really talk about the people that had high conviction in in the wrong coins um when it comes to looking for validation or invalidation I think it can be very helpful to have I mean that's basically
• 19:00 - 19:30 where your thesis comes in right um if you're not if you don't have a thesis on where the flows are going to come from who's essentially going to buy it from you um I I I dislike I dislike plays without knowing basically who I'm trading into because hoping that the next uh here here here's a here's a good frame I dislike uh I dislike plays where I am hoping for a next wave of adoption
• 19:30 - 20:00 um if that makes sense because I think anticipating and counting on that next wave of adoption is always overpriced in the short term and I think that's I think that's how how you can get wrecked um and so when when you have when when you're holding something there should be a thesis so for example robit thesis was the devs are going to make nods toward this token to make it more liquid more tradable
• 20:00 - 20:30 more attractive and when that happens I will start S the hyper liquid thesis was this is an unloved spot ecosystem right now there's about to be a multi-billion dollar airdrop into the ecosystem when that liquidity improves I will you know take profits um and so per was essentially you know by the market sort of invalidated for maybe three or four months while I was holding it from from
• 20:30 - 21:00 April to November you know traded from 15 cents back down to 10 cents or 20 cents back down to 15 cents um but that was acceptable invalidation because my thesis was still on track I was playing towards the Catalyst of the tge I was playing towards all these Tailwinds nothing about that had changed I think one thing to consider was let's say like let's say the TG hadn't gone super great
• 21:00 - 21:30 and per was still trading flat or downish and I was still holding it at that point I think you have to start asking yourself okay like what like what's the thesis here what are you holding for what's your validation inv validation um it's a long-winded way of saying it but set up your thesis such that your validation invalidation isn't necessarily driven by like pure charts but is more driven oh one one previous validation inv validation I used to have was I'll sell when it gets on CNBC and
• 21:30 - 22:00 that's actually like you know in terms of like decently time signals as soon as a ticker that that you're that you know of ends up on CNBC it's not a terrible time to take profit hey tyi here if you're enjoying the content please like And subscribe I don't run YouTube ads or have sponsors on this channel so I'd really appreciate it your engagement will help this video reach more people which will allow me to book better guests in the future now back to the episode so I I guess you know I know you as a guy that just puts massive size on
• 22:00 - 22:30 high conviction bets and I'll talk about round tripping and all that before but or after but before I get into that I want to talk about sizing um so David asked this question around you know how how do you think about sizing right um there's also this question around the Kelly Criterion I don't I don't know if you're want to touch on the Kelly but um I guess how do you think about sizing um do use a size based on conviction do you only take High conviction trades AKA just like you know do you only size up on big trades uh can you just briefly talk talk about you know how you think about sizing up yeah I think this is so
• 22:30 - 23:00 this is also partially where it goes back to like finding your Edge you know I know people that are terrified of any draw down at all and so like stable firing and a a equity chart that is a consistent lineup is their preferred um style since I started my preferred style has and my my preferred and best style has been Allin spot that's you know that's essentially what I used to be all in Amazon when I first came into crypto I went all
• 23:00 - 23:30 in the wrong spot shitcoin which was an amazing lesson then I went in all in uni then I essentially went Allin you know my my my experience has been a bunch of Allin ports essentially and so part of that is just my natural trading style that's a place that I feel very comfortable in where I have deep conviction in a thesis I put all of my cap I throw all of my Capital at my best idea why would I want Capital at my second best idea if it's going to make less money um and you know just sit in
• 23:30 - 24:00 it and wait until the thesis validates and I've been fairly fortunate enough that most of my you know all-in spot convi High conviction Place have had validation rather than um invalidation that's just Survivor bias um I think a lot of it comes down to liquidity so and that's part of what I was getting at with the leveling so depending on what you're trading let's say you're trading a good new thing which I like to Define as something that's already been somewhat
• 24:00 - 24:30 validated by the market trading at 20 to 50 it can be dangerous to be early early like being too early can be dangerous just because um it's early adopters I I don't even I I'm struggling to find the right words it's like being early is the same as being wrong right being or being too early is the same as being yeah that's that's that's a great way to say it being too early is the same as being on and so early early is a dangerous place um and so so looking at things that trade you know 50 to a
• 24:30 - 25:00 billion um at that sizing you can all in a sixf figureure portfolio you know what I mean you're going to end up being 0.1 bips 50 bips of the supply a totally manageable portion um and you don't really have to worry about being too big usually in a position like that once you're in seven all of a sudden very often you can end up being too big so for example when I ported rbit um I built a $1.2 million position against an
• 25:00 - 25:30 800k salana liquidity pool like I bought out the liquidity pool essentially um and that was just one where if I was wrong there was very little crawling out of that one um but I had conviction in my thesis um and so I think a lot of it comes down to you know what's your conviction level what's the risk return on the trade if your
• 25:30 - 26:00 conviction level is high and the risk return is better than other things that you see my style has always been why would you put Capital at your second best idea when they could just all be at your best idea yeah no but I guess that also fits your personality right like you don't care too much I mean of course you care but you're not really phased by the volatility right whereas some someone else might be like Oh I'm down 10% uh I feel like I'm going to kill myself uh so I think that's where you and I are pretty similar I'm also so I I also lean towards Allin trades I don't
• 26:00 - 26:30 full port my port uh I'm more I I lean like maybe 50 to 70% right if I have the highest conviction idea um one really memorable moment that I had with you was I think sometime last year or 2023 I think we were hanging out in New York um and we were just like hanging out like we were just like having fun and whatnot um and I was like okay like this is jez and then someone like walks up to me and he's like oh yeah like Jess just roundt tripped like his entire portfolio and I'm like but couldn't tell because you're just like smiling and talking uh
• 26:30 - 27:00 so there's so I mean you said that you've like blown up a few times um maybe because you full P things but like what is your mindset I think I think that's actually well so I full port with leverage or I I end up full porting with leverage through Martin giling and that has been a just crippling um you know that set me back so far in terms of in terms of uh uh uh Capital compounding um Can can you talk about that can you
• 27:00 - 27:30 like explain like if you're comfortable like a spot where you just like kept Mar galing um I mean I I'll say March March this year um you know I'd taken profits on the robit trade everything was at atth as you know I was at ath um I went and I uh played a home game of poker I got quite unlucky I ran Kings into Aces and queens into Kings I lost like 30k a totally manageable
• 27:30 - 28:00 size I went home tilted and because sometimes I have a bad way of thinking uh I was like all right well I'll just you know let's make that let's make going into that poker a good thing and I'll I'll leverage trade and I'll make some money so that I'm that up and I started I think eth had topped at 4K and it was like 3.7k and I was like all right a long some ethereum I you know loaded up like a 300K account I longed ethereum and I woke up and it was I liquidated or close to and I added you
• 28:00 - 28:30 know 600 1.2 to you and you see how that goes and so one thing that I'd like to draw contrast to is the full port convictions have been enormously profitable for me the things that I die in are these just you know very low Edge kind of coin flips like you know I I'll sit for eight months waiting for my thesis to validate and then I'll spend the same amount of capital on like I think eth is going to
• 28:30 - 29:00 go up today um and so I think part of that was you know stick to your Edge I think I think if I if I have one takeaway going forward is g to be you know really try not to tilt off this time yeah yeah tilting is the worst right um and can you just like talk about how you bounce back from just like Martin giling and like you know Corner blowing up so how do you like bounce back from it and how many times have you blown up cry I've crypto blown up I think four or
• 29:00 - 29:30 five times now um I Define a blow up as a you know 85% 90% draw down um some of my blowups have taken me uh I get okay I'm gonna say this you guys might want to cut this out like I don't know how this this one is a funny anecdote it's not that helpful probably for the users um but the second the not not the last time I blew up which was this year in March but the previous time
• 29:30 - 30:00 I blew up which was last year in April um I I was just wrong on Leverage Martin galling blew up my portfolio had uh I think I had like 2K 2K usdc on chain but I was fortunate enough um you know I I at that time I didn't really have much offchain either um I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of nfts that had loans on them but the loans were over
• 30:00 - 30:30 collateralized um and so I took a glyph that I had which was market value like 175 E I had borrowed 100 e against it I went to a friend there's actually an a nft confessions or something like nft ethics I think made a tweet about this I I'll link it it's quite interesting um but I went to a friend uh a very trusted friend I said hey I need to you know I'm GNA do I explained what I was going to do I borrowed 100 f from them I bought I got the glyph back I put the glyph back
• 30:30 - 31:00 up on loan I took the highest offer that anyone would give me which was actually excuse me uh hemba at 171 F very generous thank you hemba um and he so then took the 171 F went to pay back my friend with the 100f and then essentially had 70f to play with uh as a new sort of like starting out that was you know I I had I think three or four million before that restarting at 70f so it's not quite a zero but it's a very different scale um this
• 31:00 - 31:30 one's less useful for the users because I got quite lucky with this one I I essentially uh was just so so okay what do you do then sitting there with 70f what I do is I just I have very little life I sit at my computer for 16 hours a day and I just am constantly online waiting for something that fits my criteria for a good new thing to merch and as soon as it does I play around
• 31:30 - 32:00 with it a little bit to make sure that you know you don't want to be desperate you don't want to full port things that aren't deserving of a full port so make sure that you're not lowering your standards just because you're in a worse situation but wait around a little bit play and then just full port and so in that case I got fortunate enough that um Pepe actually came out about a three or four days after that blow up happened um and so I was a able to full port into Pepe you know under 50 million market
• 32:00 - 32:30 cap sit there for two weeks W like just banging the table that like this is the first meme coin we've seen like this in a while um and then and then take profits on that one nice I I love about earlier in N pod you're like yeah like I can't really build conviction in you know in meme coins and then after you you blow up and then you have 70 Pepe Pepe Pepe is the one no but I want to point out Pepe was very different from a lot of the meme coins right now because Pepe was the
• 32:30 - 33:00 first and only Pepe had no uh uh like attention competition outside of the old incumbent of do Shea fi it was like an entirely new onchain uh you know for for that time period got it yeah I guess like a commonality here it's almost more of a first mover than it is a meme Corin interesting yeah so I guess like a common Trend that I noticed with with people I interview is that like a lot of people like blow up at least once but
• 33:00 - 33:30 they have this innate belief in themselves that they can do it again maybe because they've done it before right so I guess if you've done it before and you blow up then you know it's possible so you're able to just go back I want to say okay the first time is hard because you know there's this feeling of hey I'm decent at this stuff and now I have nothing to show for it the second time is I I found the second time was the hardest because it's like H like I've done it again like oh my gosh I did it again um for me the third
• 33:30 - 34:00 fourth fifth times I'm not going to say that they're not hard you know tough phone calls to friends helping me out but at the same time there is exactly that confidence of I've done this before I can do it again I know what to look for um and so for example on this one I had blown up in March April and you know as the previous times sat there waiting for a good new opportunity to come out and I think two weeks after I blew up Jeff launched per and that was just very obvious to me of
• 34:00 - 34:30 I was already very bullish on hyper liquid here was a good new thing that had it just you know perfectly chipped all the boxes yeah but I guess you know I guess when uh when when you were gaming right uh you were like eternally online flipping uh I guess like loot uh and it's really similar right crypto is kind of like in MMO RPG because there's always new games to play um and it's up to you the market participant to determ determine if this thing is a new good thing and the the hardest pumps always
• 34:30 - 35:00 happen in like a good new thing um what do you think about the current AI meta I think that's kind of been capturing all the attention um there was like this question around like how big these things can get do you have like a little framework on like if these things can keep going higher or yeah can you just give your general thoughts I think part of my thoughts on the AI meta need to be contextualized with bias which is that I've sort of missed out on a lot of the AI meta I had bought 2% of goat at like
• 35:00 - 35:30 eight or 10 million market cap uh you know a friend had just sent into a group chat hey brief headline of it I was so excited about it that I was I was out in Japan I remember I immediately texted like three or four close friends like hey you up like you know had them fire 10K Clips at it as I was running back to my hotel to buy more um when I look back at my private investing at my liquids I notice a trend I notice a trend of
• 35:30 - 36:00 extreme fdv sensitivity in things like that look like Defi and things that look like maybe layers and things that look like uh you know things that crypto knows how to Value I have pretty pretty pretty strong uh uh FTV sensitivity there AI I found through anecdotal evidence that on the two AI deals that I did I had no fdv sensitivity like like oh sure how many 00 million like wave it in I'll do that round um and it's
• 36:00 - 36:30 because it's against the backdrop of you know Sam Alton spending seven trillion on a on a semiconductor Factory uh investing 80 billion into like internal AI tools there's just um such a capital spend on the AI side that I think people don't really know how to Value these things and that is what allows for sort of the dream to still be alive it's very hard for us to get like an amm on an L2 above say 50 million at this point because everybody knows what that game
• 36:30 - 37:00 is maybe cut that out because I am a seed investor in amm on an L2 and I don't want to accidentally neg them but um everybody like like everybody knows what what how the game is played with a lot of these other constructs with AI it's a new playing field which allows people to dream a lot higher um and so that's something that I've learned and I think is supporting a lot a lot of this backdrop when I look at how people are actually interacting with these things
• 37:00 - 37:30 um to me what how this current like crypto xai Twitter meta is is it's replacing like shitcoin shot colls um which always played like a crucial role in the market um I'm talking about you know guys like it's not it's not Lil Moon Lambo but it's like the equivalence of you know they played they they were obviously in it for their selfish own reasons but they played a sort of a crucial Market uh uh role in gathering
• 37:30 - 38:00 and and uh coordinating attention like even people who disliked what they did would appreciate the pumps that would come after it because you could just trade around these things um people essentially like even if you know that this guy isn't good everyone wants somebody to just coordinate the attention and what these AI Twitter things have done is essentially I think abstract that um take away sort of the the middleman who could have you know a
• 38:00 - 38:30 lot of like Insider or or back room deals and self-enrichment and they've just sort of created these like robotic megaphones that everyone is currently primed to pay attention to which has like a feedback loop of like okay well as long as everyone's paying attention to that what it says is important and is tradable then um one thing I think that's really important to contextualize in crypto metas is for a meta to work people have to be figuring out a way to make money like like we're all playing a game and
• 38:30 - 39:00 the core game here is speculation and trying to make money so then you look at like okay how are people interacting with these AI Bots it's you know uh uh replying underneath it to try to seed the AI bot with their with their shitcoin it's uh uh trading off of the things that they're calling it's buying access to what they're going to call so that you can maybe front run their colum it's all these little metas around the coordination of the showing that have like sprung up and allowed people to
• 39:00 - 39:30 find a way to participate in this narrative in In Like A Plus way I think people need to contextualize maybe the wealth that some of these Founders are getting for the amount of substance they're putting out and ask themselves does that make the founder more less motivated to keep working on this project going forward no I definitely agree um I think majority of these agents are pure SLO but there's going to be few that's going to be in the billions um and I think one commonality
• 39:30 - 40:00 of I guess crypto markets after playing all these games is that new metas are basically like being early as a service right uh everyone wants to feel early so whenever something new emerges and people have the dream of oh like what if this thing pulls like this defi boom oh like the current market cap is 15 it's going to go to 200 holy [ __ ] I'm so early time to buy all these things right uh so it's literally early as a service and I guess um people want to be told
• 40:00 - 40:30 what to do right that's why people watch these videos or like they follow Twitter callers or YouTube callers um and I guess know these AI like redirecting attention right so oh like the AI said it's good therefore it must be good I think so the best thing that the AI meta has right now is the ability to continue dreaming on valuation I think it's very hard to buy a defi coin at 400 million or at a billion and expect 100 X we just we know we know what that market is but the AI
• 40:30 - 41:00 is just you know it could be anything and so there's nothing really tethering um stuff I think I think that's the real value unlock there yeah it's a dreaming as a service one corner where the dream you know in crypto very often we sell dreams I I I I made that post where you know I cried in 2021 when I fumbled my uni because I had this dream of staking uni and rent seeking the Global Financial system and I was just you know that was my that was retirement plan and I had the you know I wanted to
• 41:00 - 41:30 accumulate a 100,000 ining I had it once I fumbled it and I cried because I was like well that was my chance and and now it's gone and obviously that dream was incorrect but the point is that I had that dream and I don't think that that dream exists for a lot of defi anymore I don't think that that dream exists for a lot of like dog meme coins but I do think that that dream exists who they are yeah so you know you mentioned before I I guess this is a post from December 15th that right now maybe you
• 41:30 - 42:00 don't see any High conviction idea so you're mostly stabled up um do you think that there's any interesting plays happening in AI or are you just still kind of lots of interesting plays in AI I'm just you know um I'm not I'm I I think a lot part of it is bias from missing goat part of it is bias from you know maybe knowing it's not that I know too much about I but I probably know more than the average um
• 42:00 - 42:30 you saw that a lot with nfts was you know very strong visual uh programming artists were missed out on a lot of nfts because to them it was slop it was like these are tutorials these are slop I why would you spend five figures on a tutorial I don't understand this Market um so sometimes it's maybe like sing sing a little bit too much of the sausage I think one way to frame where we are is a bit of a transitory period I think we're maybe moving away from a
• 42:30 - 43:00 period where traditional infrastructure was valued very very highly and we're more moving towards a period where some of the apps themselves like hyper liquid are valued very highly in that cross-section I don't see a lot of opportunities that make me excited to deploy Capital at valuations I think one thing to contextualize is in my opinion this is a
• 43:00 - 43:30 very reflexive cycle um this AI trend is actually the first thing that people can really sink their teeth into before this I would say we haven't had any Innovations this cycle um outside of the price going up yeah which is always the most important fundamental but um in in Prior Cycles you had um a lot more I would say quote unquote real Innovations whether it's it's you know stable coins
• 43:30 - 44:00 or defi or or new token types um I think this this cycle has been a lot more about you know price going up especially bitcoin price going up and then the narratives that come around with that um what makes me more concerned is I wonder than who is the buyer of Last Resort in this cycle yeah I guess when you're buying any coin right if you're buying some if you're
• 44:00 - 44:30 buying robit at 50 then you're envisioning a world where you know someone's going to buy it at half a billion because of the P ratios whereas if you're buying like some like defi token it's like who the [ __ ] going to buy it at 3x if you're buying this AI coin right uh who are who's like the marginal buyer um and I guess like that's kind of always a question you have to ask yourself if you're buying this token at X valuation well you have to Envision a world where someone's going to happily buy it from you like at 10x valuation um and if you can't name that marginal buyer then you probably
• 44:30 - 45:00 shouldn't long that coin and that's kind of coming back to that prior point that I made that I never really feel that comfortable waiting for the next wave of adoption I always want like okay this clearly has a bunch of friction and when that friction reduces this user set is going to come in on board and and and you know make flows better um I think I think just waiting on the general population to uptake it is you know in an environment like this absolutely possibly correct but I just just think historically a dangerous V yeah I I
• 45:00 - 45:30 really like the how you frame that hey like why would I like the reason you full port is because why would I allocate money to my second best idea I'd rather just full port into like the best idea right um so in a way I think there's this XM MGR tweet where it's like you know you just pick up the free money five times a year otherwise just sit in stables and you'll like outperform the hardest part is Stables the hardest part is sitting on your hands and doing nothing yeah because I guess you log in to Twitter everyone's like bull posting you go on telegram
• 45:30 - 46:00 everyone's saying oh I made so much money it's like oh [ __ ] like but comparison is a deep of Joy right comparison is always a deep of Joy always yeah I I don't want to go back to this article because I think you talked about the leveling guide so how does someone make it if they have four figs and Below five fig and Below um can you like just talk about leveling um and general tips for someone because I always ask someone right um or whenever whenever do this podcast um I tell them or I ask the guest like how does someone
• 46:00 - 46:30 make it right because I think the majority of my audience may be sitting at five figure or six figure portfolios they want to get it to like seven uh do you have any general advice for how someone can make it for the rest of 2025 I'll just speak from anecdotal experience of watching others you know I've have a lot of experience in my group chats of whe whether it's mentoring or just watching sharp people come up the archetype that I see and and you can sort of just identify you see you see these traits in a person
• 46:30 - 47:00 out a five or six figure portfolio and you're like okay this person is probably going to make it is um strong hunger like onlin essentially are they willing to do the the boots on the ground find the opportunities strong resilience can they get knocked down and get back up can they take small losses can they take large losses and and keep going um can they take being wrong and and searching
• 47:00 - 47:30 to find right can they change their mind you know people think changing your mind is weakness no like changing your bias to new information is very important um it's it's a mixture of these factors uh and it's a com it's essentially a combination of risk appetite hungriness and onlineessay more defined not necessarily easier um
• 47:30 - 48:00 one thing I would just say is uh you know for almost all of the levels I would always recommend having a job um as counterintuitive as that sounds uh because a job can stop you from sort of like being perpetually online a job can stop you from seeing new opportunities but a job can also one just be a a fantastic APR Farm depending on what your net worth is um and really like consider that you know what are you doing spend eight
• 48:00 - 48:30 hours a day if you can make 200% a year trading would you take that trade and if that trade was you trading you know what I mean like a lot of times if you ask people if you 3x your portfolio like would you trade like would you be a Trader and they're like yeah and you're like okay well just go work and it's the same but um it's but working is less fun um but the uh uh um the other thing that it makes you do is it makes I I think sometimes sitting on your hands and doing nothing while there is no good new
• 48:30 - 49:00 thing and not forcing a good new thing is really important and I think what a job can do is it can give you the patience the runway the just the external setting to be comfortable doing that whereas I would imagine if you're don't have an extra income source and this is your full-time there's a much higher level of pressure of I have to find something you know every day every week every month or whatever it may be even if even if good enough opportunities aren't coming up got it um once okay that's outside of
• 49:00 - 49:30 the job let's say your five or six portfolios you match the traits that that I described as desirable um and and you want to go up I have almost always witnessed people exit those levels with full ports with conviction I think one issue with a diversified portfolio is it requires you to be right a lot more like if you've 20 if you split your portfolio you know
• 49:30 - 50:00 into five bets of course it allows you to be wrong more too but you know we're Traders let's hope to assume that we're g to be right how do we make the most when we're right um You you know you make the most from your best ideas you make the most from your best ideas if you put all your Capital into them um I just think that you know in this in this world where okay let's say you're wrong on a spot High conviction play like what's your draw down 50% maybe like like let's say you're just like catastrophically wrong over the period of like a year and you
• 50:00 - 50:30 bought it at a bad time probably down like 60% so like a 50 50 60% loss what's your upside it's like you know 10x 100x like like much higher than these losses and so so so part of my point is that um it's not the end of the world when you're wrong on a full Port High conviction spot it can be the end of the world if depending on how long you sat in it if you like had real opportunity cost um but just the asymmetry of these plays uh means it really only takes one
• 50:30 - 51:00 you've got to be right once um and I think most people in six years can be right once yeah I guess there's also survivorship bias right there's for every jez there's like 10 dudes that full ported something and it went to zero but I guess you had a job right so if you have a job then you can full port be wrong and then maybe six months later you just do it again yep but I I think I think also what I would say is is anecdotal evidence of people doing this
• 51:00 - 51:30 strategy graduating um whereas other strategies maybe either taking longer or or or working you know less we we never talk about one one thing I'd like to point out is nobody ever talks about profitable options Traders you know you even talk about profitable leverage Traders but that's a smaller category like who out here is interviewing profitable option buyers for example it's not a very good instrument you don't see a lot of like lifetime running on it yeah that's interesting I guess if
• 51:30 - 52:00 you if I if I think about people that's made it right uh they made it through full porting um I don't really hear people like making it through option trading right so therefore maybe it's not good to think about how you know people made it and this lines up this lines up with my observed anecdotal experience of of watching it's not just like pure selection bias of seeing the top accounts but I think the way that most people tradition make it is spot High conviction and I think mainly because you only have to be right once
• 52:00 - 52:30 you know if you want to make a career out of Leverage trading you essentially can never be wrong the the danger with leverage trading is it's kind of the inverse if you're wrong once out of severity with leverage trading you get wiped out whereas you only have to be right once with with severity of spot conviction to make it yeah I guess you know I I have a poker background so it's like you know whenever there's a good spot like I really don't mind putting in size um like I I think you kind of fall under the category of like believing in
• 52:30 - 53:00 the Kelly Criterion um and I'm not I'm not going to go over this but basically tldr is that you know the optimal bet size when you have an edge tends to be a lot bigger than what you would think right I think a lot of people they're like oh I'll put 2% of my portfolio into this thing whatever um but if you actually have an edge like you should be like putting 50% of your portfolio right that that's like the most optimal strategy uh of course in crypto like you know you can go to zero right uh so do you have any comment on like Kelly uh do you
• 53:00 - 53:30 think it's like's funny is we I'd actually made some alts with a friend um and he was Kelly Criterion and I was Martin gayer oh I I know this I know this I know I know I know the Kelly Criterion guy yeah so I I would um there is an element of Kelly Criterion in it in terms of sizing up with with conviction um what I would say I Stray From Kelly Criterion is I generally just full size rather than Like An Elegant like like yeah why why go for 60% when I
• 53:30 - 54:00 can just go 100% again it's just you know what is that last 10% getting me in my second best idea it could get me more in my best that's usually how I thought about it um yeah no no it's interesting because like for example like right right now right as of now like I have like half my port in fcoin because it's like my best idea and I think that's like pretty agreed but sometimes I do think that okay maybe it's just best to full part but there's
• 54:00 - 54:30 also the element of like okay like you know 50% 100% there's a marginal difference there because if I'm wrong then well it's like if I'm wrong on a defi coin it's like it's it's fine if I'm wrong on fcoin it's like dude this this guy this guy's a [ __ ] idiot H so but I guess I shouldn't worry about I mean I want to really I want to really congratulate you on sort of it can be very hard to overcome certain labels that the market can put on you because they can kind of be like conditionally self-fulfilling so for example if you get labeled as like a top signal it can
• 54:30 - 55:00 actually be very difficult to craw it it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because this whole Market works on attention if the whole Market is like okay well this is the you know announced time that we should probably stop paying attention to this then that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's very I think it's very it can be very difficult to to change that once it's become and I think that you successfully did that with bcoin and the way way to do it is you just have to be outstandingly right in conviction on something and just show
• 55:00 - 55:30 the whole Market you're like oh yeah no it's funny because we just talked about the AI meta and because so many people have called me a top signal like there's so much like like AI xbt for example like thinks of me as a top signal like these all these AI agents view Ty as a top signal yeah they've been trained on like the past two months of like it's Twitter data and they all think I'm like toop signal uh so there's a chance that if there if in like two
• 55:30 - 56:00 months there's like an AI bot that trades it's just going to countertrade everything I tweet out right so this type like this element of a selfing prophecy is like very interesting um but I I I really enjoy this conversation because you know I I talk to a lot of people um they're never as like aggressive as you right um they're say yeah you know like bet big when you think you're right but like I I never hear someone say hey yeah like 100% full uh so I really appreciate your honesty it's it's worked out well for me
• 56:00 - 56:30 but I am Survivor bias of supporting the right coins right so I guess you know you should only full port once you have experience right like if you're coming into crypto for the first time and you full port then chances are you have zero Edge you need to be able to I guess once you found Edge is probably a good addend right right uh so one of the last questions I'll ask you is of course um you know from Samurai here uh I I guess you kind of talk talked about point one
• 56:30 - 57:00 and three but do you have any views on hyper liquid um I know you sold some um but you know I think everyone Associates you with it so I figured I one thing I also want to point out is the hyper liquid pnl is a very you know it's only since essentially like July August of which like I was I had a good run with being bearish on the EF and then I had a good run with the chop city um in October historically I'm not a profitable leverage Trader like when you
• 57:00 - 57:30 look like you know when I take a step back and I look at my p&l in each of those buckets like my good new thing hunting is almost like a direct offset with like Leverage losses like they're very like positive and negative overall even even if I've been profitable since July so one I just want to like yes I'm profitable and Hyper liquid but overall I'm not and I think that's part of where some of my learned experience warning against leverage comes from um talking about hyper liquid itself I
• 57:30 - 58:00 mean it's just clear there's a lot special there Jeff is a special founder you don't get a lot of founders with that level of both competency building and competency in domain expertise you know Market making and exchanges um it's clearly built something special it's a best-in-class product I think when when other uh when other Founders asked me what makes hyper liquid so special I usually Point them to a interaction I had with Jeff back in January of this
• 58:00 - 58:30 year so in January of this year I had a large bit at the time you know I think Bitcoin oi in January of one year ago was like a 100 million 110 million I had like a 10 million Bitcoin long on so I was like 10% of that why I went uh the the coin Telegraph or whatever like there was some leak Bitcoin went up a bunch I went to take profits on the Bitcoin going up um I set one of the latter scale orders um instead of setting it from 72k to 72.2k I set it from 7.2k to
• 58:30 - 59:00 7.22k um and so essentially Market sold 10 million into the book um it like slipped at like eight% or something I I lost a ton of money on that but it's like it it I was profitable on the trade so I didn't care that much um and I tweeted I was like hey you know I didn't understand how the Oracle system worked I thought it was on Mark not on like the Oracle price so I tweeted out like hey I'm sorry anybody I just liquidated like I just donated to hlp book um and Jeff
• 59:00 - 59:30 responded actually he's like I'm so sorry this happened like how can we avoid this um and I was like well it just user error like I fat I fat finger this is my fault not nothing Chang um and Jeff was like well what if you know we had like cat like popups that like stopped you from like doing this I was like well usually I value like latency and execution over safety um as demonstrated by the fact that like you know uh uh different tools that I use generally are expediency very latency
• 59:30 - 60:00 focused and Jeff was like oh okay well you know we sort of went through it and it was like well what if uh if I'm putting in a limit order 5% away from from mid then give me a pop he's like okay well what about Market orders because sometimes those have high slippage too and I'm like well you know a lot of times if I'm on Market I kind of have an intention to slip but if I'm on limit I'm probably not intending to slip that hard and it's probably more of a mistake and then the next day if you went in like and it's still up there today obviously if you go in and you put a limit order in over like 10% away or
• 60:00 - 60:30 8% away you get a little popup like written in my blood um telling you you know are you sure you want to do this um and so to me it's that interaction where he you know is just a random user like almost meane post on Twitter he saw someone had an experience drilled into it and by the end of like 30 minutes had a takeaway to improve the exchange and the next day it was implemented and you do that over the course of a year and a half couple times a day there like that's that's how you build the
• 60:30 - 61:00 best-in-class product right right and I guess you only figured this out because you decided to tweet it right because you tweeted you had this interaction which made you more bullish hype which maybe allowed you to build more conviction so like maybe that tweet was worth a few million dollars for you even though at the time you didn't know it right so I think it's like the value of just putting yourself out there uh even you know if people will meme you for just like this like selling Market selling Bitcoin or whatever making my Twitter account back in 2020 2021 was
• 61:00 - 61:30 the best thing I ever done yeah and I guess like you said at the very beginning of the episode finding your group is most important and the only way to do so is by I guess putting yourself out there uh mostly on Twitter right um can I ask you about the poker hand I have the hand history of you busting up oh God I I want to ask you about I want to ask you about I played so well for four days and then I just blew up on a random big blind hand no no because I I saw this hand history saw me fold Jacks
• 61:30 - 62:00 to the Queens like h no because uh okay so okay before I show the hand history can you just go over like the T poker tournament you entered and like why you entered Etc so I have been a losing cash game poker player for about a year and a half now um it's something that uh I originally turned to actually I turned to it as a distraction from Leverage trading I was like okay I'm going to start trying to
• 62:00 - 62:30 play more high stakes poker because what's the worst I can like I have a terrible night at high six poker I lose like 20K like I can live with that uh like you know leverage trading losses are generally much larger um obviously it had a it backfired when I ended up tilting off after a poker game but that was the original idea to get into um it actually taught me a bunch about waiting like like Edge spots spots um stuff like that but I but just as a context I've been a losing cash game player for a
• 62:30 - 63:00 month a year and a half but when I have played these very infrequent online CT uh poker tournaments I'm I'm in a telegram group that just every now and then fires off random cheap tournaments uh I had cashed every single online little tournament that I had played um and you know part of that is different uh sample size part of that is just a different play style when I play cash I have a vpip of like 80 or 90 percent like legitimately just I'm just I'm the
• 63:00 - 63:30 fish right I want to play hands I want to see flops I'm playing B I'm playing bingo half the time I'm trying to bully people um when I played these online tournaments I was just the Nitti EST nit right like Ace Jack and somebody else three bet like I'm out of there like it's too much um slightly joking but you saw some of that on on stream um and so that was sort of my plan I was like okay well I've cashed every tournament I just played like turbo net um I have just had the large hyper liquid um win I was going on vacation to Hawaii I wanted you
• 63:30 - 64:00 know I've just been looking for distractions ways to not try not like punting off and losing money on a euphor trade um and I had a friend who was going to Vegas to play in this tournament he's he's a professional book player he's like I'm gonna go play in this tournament I was like oh that sounds fun I've always wanted I'd talked about it before I'd always wanted to do it um I joined him I played uh so it was actually my final table run was the first and basically only tournament I've ever like really played in poker outside
• 64:00 - 64:30 of these like CT online ones um I bought in um and my strategy was essentially everyone else is probably better than me so I want to play as little post flop as possible essentially like I don't I if like na High variant right well yes and no I actually never got one thing that I'm like I never got the it's partially luck but I never got the money in bad until that final hand
• 64:30 - 65:00 um I I I was just very very tight I was just I was I played like four or five hands a day I was you know just folding almost everything I was just trying to win my blinds back on every single button I had my hoodie on my sunglasses yeah did I said nothing for four days straight I was just like you know because anything I say is just going to like Express how bad I am so I'm just like I'm and it worked I had such an
• 65:00 - 65:30 aura at these tables because I let let let me screen share this look at the aura oh my God so much Aura and this was after they handicapped me so when I actually went into the final table they said uh no headphones so I lost my music which was my main skill device in not like punting off bad hands and keeping me keeping me motivated uh I they took away my hoodie so they said
• 65:30 - 66:00 your ears have to be shown so I couldn't wear my hoodie up which was my safe space and they actually took away coaches um on this one so I had hired after I made the final table I hired a coach for that night and the morning after and then he was going to be on my rail and help me out and they actually banned coaches at this tournament so we had we could only talk on breaks so anyway they took away a lot of the stuff at the end yes all right so back back story right um when you're playing cash you're basically a whale right you're just
• 66:00 - 66:30 voluntarily put pot vpip like 80% of the time you're you know you're at a spot but in tournaments you're a knit as in you're like super tight you play like an old man so with that background let's talk about this hand history uh which look I I I'm in some poker chats you know because I also roasted for this people were roasting you so let's talk about this so I think hand3 yeah this guy raises from the hijack to 3.3 million and you call from big big
• 66:30 - 67:00 line okay that's fine flop comes Jack 83 rainbow you check so I know I have a terrible check r hand I know I have a terrible check race hand like I know I don't have the right shape of it I know my turn bet was bad I knew this stuff actually as I was doing it part of my thinking is these are such unconventional plays that I could just maybe catch them off guard at the end with an Ace King um okay setting some context uh actually the com when went back and I watched it the commentators mentioned this um Zack got such quality
• 67:00 - 67:30 hands if you can see the whole cards but sitting at the table he was the chip leader and he was playing like 80% like 70% VP yeah and so it felt at the table that he was bullying um and so like that's my wrong head read was he's bullying people um we get to the thing he and you actually one thing that that's funny is I check raised with this hand and I actually folded a hand on stream the day before where I flopped top pair um
• 67:30 - 68:00 because my plan going in it was very similar it was like I had nine3 suited of clubs I flopped top pair nine but my whole plan was going into this was I'm going to complete my big blind if I end up with a flush or a flush draw I'll stay and I don't want to play any pairs because I don't want to have to like okay I flop to I flop a nine and then a jack comes out on the turn or a king comes out on the river um how do I deal with the sizing going forward that I was just trying to make final table at that point so I actually folded a top pair
• 68:00 - 68:30 nine with the 93 suited to a continuation bet the day before I was trying to make the final table now having made the final table I've got I I complete my spa blind with 10 six I have uh the Flop comes I whiff the Flop he leads out I put him on like Ace queen or Ace King or like Ace 10 if he had Ace Jack it was going be [ __ ] me I check ra to try to get him off and
• 68:30 - 69:00 when he called I was like okay well he's calling with two overs because you sort of just like have to defend that range then I hit 10 on the turn and I'm like okay I can get value out of two overs now and like nobody it's a very slim range you're targeting sir yeah I know and I was just running into a set but again like qu well at the time on the turn it was still a yeah and and I'm you know I'm hoping
• 69:00 - 69:30 that you know my image has been Far and Away essentially the tightest at the table I've never put money in without being good my check raise the stream before um and I maybe I indexed too much on my one stream of play because I was like well this is the only history that all these other final tabls will have and so I sort of kind of tried to inverse a bunch of that um this last time I check raised with King Jack pair this time I check raised with [ __ ] DUS um so there was a bit of like I knew
• 69:30 - 70:00 in my hand okay I know I want a flush draw like a gut shot a black door flush draw or a gut shot in this hand as I'm doing this um but I just had sort of had enough of his bullying and I wanted to take a you're tilted uh yeah I mean I didn't have my music right I didn't have my music I didn't have my hoodie I was just like uh oh and I think the hand before or like a couple hands before I had had to lay down my Jacks which was a good fold
• 70:00 - 70:30 against Zach's Queens but I you know missed I was I was tilted because I knew that that other guy was full absolutely full of [ __ ] but then when Zach three three bet or four bet I couldn't continue so I think I was tilted because I had to lay down the Jacks um so I know I when I when I've thought about this hand a lot because I'm i' I've been pretty beat up that like I was like hey it was my first tournament I had this miracle run I had a really cool Story I played really well up until day four I even played pretty well through day four
• 70:30 - 71:00 until that hand and then just absolute devastation um I don't entirely hate the way that I've played it out except for my River call which was just me being like overwhelmed in the moment and like like the river call was I was the river call was um I was still very unfamiliar with stack sizes the thing that I had gone over with the coach the most is because I'm coming from C just reload essentially like I I had trouble reading chip counts and so I
• 71:00 - 71:30 actually thought that my River call was a lot less than it ended up being I thought I was River calling for like eight million or something versus 17 I didn't take any time to think about it when I had infinite time chips to think about and I just was like it was just one where you're just like you know your beat and you're just praying that he's on Ace King um uh and you flick in the call and in like a cash it's almost like a bad cash game habit where like in the cash game you just call that off to like reset your stack and buy back in and in this I still had Steiner on my
• 71:30 - 72:00 right or whatever at like I was still covering him even if I'd fed um that that that hand there so the thing that I mostly beat me up on is just like an overwhelmed like River call like in the moment um but the rest of the the unconventional Miss was I admit terrible and I knew it was terrible in the moment I was just trying to like okay this is such an unconventional play and I'm seen as this very very tight player like can I get away with it interesting okay I I guess
• 72:00 - 72:30 you know people criti people love to criticize people but we don't know the meta we don't know the meta right but at least I'm not at a place to criticize anyone because you cashed out for like 200k and look at the aura you came out and you're just you're not even phased you're like yo I I still have millions from my hyper liquid airdrop I'm fine yeah and big thanks to you know everybody that came out and supported uh Jandy Tom mer it was fun having a I had a real rail that was a lot of fun yeah and that's also part of the
• 72:30 - 73:00 benefits of having a group right like once you have a friend group you can travel together you know have fun together and you just overall enjoy life together um so anyways oh I do want to point out on my on the hand that I died on I got to bet 420 and 69 oh my check Ra was my check rate go go look my check raise was for 4200 and my turn donk was for 6,900 you're you're such a meme
• 73:00 - 73:30 Lord that's fantastic that's fantastic this this is why we love jazz but anyways thank you for the comprehensive hand history analysis I appreciate it but yeah anyways thank you for your time Jaz uh you know everyone that's watching this we're all trying to make it out here so do you have any final words of advice to those that's you know trying to get to where you're at right now I think the main thing is don't don't give up you know it it has parallels with the just keep gambling meme but hopefully hopefully you've got
• 73:30 - 74:00 Edge and so it's not just you know shooting in the dark um but you know there have been many points where I wanted to uh uh sort of like stop trading for a while or even just like you know after a blowup after every blow up you you sort of have a a few days of reflection of like is this the right industry for me like am I you know am I doing the right thing um and I remember actually dming a friend uh after this most recent blow up I dm'd a friend and I offered him
• 74:00 - 74:30 um I offered him a buyout of my liquids I was basically like hey I don't know if this is the right industry for me like I can't control myself sometimes like would do you want to like buy out my exposure for like 50 cents on the dollar or something and I'll just go be a ski bomb or something and he actually responded jez this is the most bullish thing you've ever texted me bu more right now and this was like it was it was at a by more what no just general markeet exp he's just like he was just like like this is the most bullish thing that you've ever
• 74:30 - 75:00 texted me you trying to capitulate out and I like took a step back and I was like yeah okay like I I see I see that point like that's that's probably correct I then so I got I got back to it um but yeah I would say you know uh don't give up this this Market has a way of surprising you with new opportunities yeah because like like you said right I think earlier you said that dis cycle has mostly been around number go up and not really about I guess Innovation um and that's why we had like the the meme coin super cycle and
• 75:00 - 75:30 whatnot which you know still might happen but out of nowhere right like goat came up like truth terminal and now it's spawned this new meta so you can't really predict the future you know all you have to do is just or all we can do is just be around pay attention and pounce at the right opportunities quickly y yeah and I guess we've both developed all this muscle memory of like when we see something like we usually tend to know with intuition whether it's going to pump or not right and I guess like that
• 75:30 - 76:00 you can only develop over time after seeing all these games play out um and I guess like the hardest part is how to size and when to get out but it seems like your strategy of full porting on your best idea uh usually tends to work out but I guess you know you shouldn't be full port every time right like or like 365 days Z you shouldn't be full port right you should be cash or full Port whenever you find a high conviction idea I really want to point out my full ports are not like this is a pretty
• 76:00 - 76:30 chart I think this will go up my full ports have something external that I can underly my conviction on whether it's founder Intuition or protocol intuition like there's some thesis that has an a validation and an invalidation but that's my style other people might have styles with a full port on the meme coin where those validations inv validations are much more directly tied to the price right yeah and I guess you know from a verus perspective you have to figure out what works for you you know like what works for jzz and I probably doesn't work for
• 76:30 - 77:00 most of the population um we're probably we probably have developed some elements of mental illness that allows us to deal with all these swings I think with some of the volatility and the conviction maybe not but I do think if I if I had a one true style to preach I it's probably actually meme coin holding to be honest but I think that that just kills more people as well yeah there's always Survivor and yeah for every for every guy that
• 77:00 - 77:30 made it in meme coins there's like 50 people that literally died and we don't hear about them anymore all right well thanks Jaz do you have any final words for our audience today um keep going you can have fun online you can have fun online yeah you know like like I do with my green you can have fun online I'm serious look at look at I'm not going to say that there's a correlation but I just want to point out look at your performance once you started having fun online versus
• 77:30 - 78:00 once you started taking it so seriously oh my God that's so true yeah dude ever since I bought this green doildo my portfolio has been up only I need to buy more green I need to buy more dild you're interacting with the market in a more organic way you're having fun with it and you're doing things that are like you think are fun which other people find fun too versus like trying to force something on the market like trying to force you're this is like actually so I didn't even think about it that way but you're right no we we should all
• 78:00 - 78:30 have fun right we should all ship post and when we ship post we get more engagement when we get more engagement we have a better I guess pulse on the markets we have to have fun we have to have fun oh wow that's a fantastic way to end it well thank you jez I appreciate the time uh and hopefully the audience is enjoyed it too thank you guys for watching and see you guys another time bye bye thanks for watching until the end if you enjoy the content please like And subscribe for additional content make sure to check out my premium Discord where I post three additional videos per week and I share
• 78:30 - 79:00 my portfolio in real time thank you again for your support and I'll see you another time bye-bye