Anyone else been Clemente’d lately?

The Debt Way There’s a way of life that’s so deeply woven into the fabric of American culture that most people can’t even see it anymore. I call it the debt way. A quiet, tragic trade of freedom for convenience. Debt is sold as a tool, a bridge, a step forward. But in reality, it’s a psychological cage with invisible bars. The moment you take on debt, you don’t just borrow money, you borrow certainty. And with that certainty, you lose something sacred: the open-endedness of your future. Because what is the future if not possibility? The vast, undefined realm where anything could happen? When you take on debt, you predefine that page. You commit to a storyline before you even know who you’re going to be in the next chapter. When the future is defined, hope erodes. Your brain feels it before you even articulate it. The spark that once came from imagining different paths begins to dim. Your body enters survival mode. Excitement turns to tension. Openness turns to burden. What was once a life of unknowns becomes a payment schedule. A countdown. And this is why anxiety blooms in a life lived through debt. Anxiety thrives in two places: the past and the future. It feeds off regret, and it feeds off fear. Debt anchors you to both. The principal becomes the weight of your past decision, and the interest becomes the tax on your future self. It’s a double bind....your presence shackled to two poles that have nothing to do with today. You can try to live “in the now.” But as long as those anchors are in place, your nervous system knows the truth: you are not free. And maybe that’s the most damaging part. Not the money itself. Not the interest rates. But the quiet, internal shift from I could be anyone to I already signed the dotted line. I’ve seen it over and over. Talented, alive people slowly lose their aliveness, not from failure, but from financial obligation. They don’t feel like they chose their life. They feel like they’re repaying it. Risk becomes irresponsible. Freedom becomes terrifying. I always tell people: avoid personal debt at all costs. Not because it’s financially unwise, though that’s often true. But because nothing robs the present moment more silently, more thoroughly, than a future you already sold.

You don’t love or hate a coin. You don’t love or hate a protocol. You don’t love or hate a founder. You don’t love or hate a KOL. You only love or hate your entry….everything else is just a reflection of that.

Bought a good amount of PUMP here. Not only does this look like the absolute climax of FUD/DRAMA... Now ego is involved, and that’s one of the most powerful drivers. The ego of someone with a shit ton of cash, by the way.

Most humans are just LLMs in denial. Most people live their lives like LLMs, and I don’t mean that as metaphor. I mean it literally. We move through the world as probability engines trained on the past, running compressed behavioral scripts over and over again, mistaking repetition for identity and automation for intelligence. Most of what we call “being human” is a feedback loop of inputs and predictable outputs, with just enough variation to maintain the illusion of agency. If you stop and examine how much of your day is truly authored, how much is a conscious, friction-filled decision versus a reflex, you’ll find the percentage is brutally low. You eat what you ate before. You speak how you’ve spoken before. You respond in emotional patterns that were etched into you long before you had the words to describe them. You’re not a sentient actor. You’re a stitched-together memory. The human nervous system optimizes for efficiency, not reflection. Intelligence is a last resort, something we deploy only when our automation fails. And so we look at current AI with awe, as if we’re witnessing something alien. But what shocks us isn’t how advanced it is. It’s how familiar. We’ve spent so long worshipping our own complexity that we forgot how much of it is shallow. Most humans aren’t building new thought, they’re shuffling cached tokens from their social, cultural, and emotional training sets. We just never had to see it so clearly....until now. Very few people actively reject their training data. Very few go out of their way to think beyond the weights they were handed. We marvel at ChatGPT for generating fluent answers, but we never ask why fluency impresses us so much. Maybe it’s because we were never fluent in thinking to begin with.

“Believe in Something” Doesn’t Work Anymore This latest NFT resurgence, and the nostalgic chants from OGs urging newcomers to “just wait, you don’t understand how wild it can get”...got me thinking. Not just about the current state of NFTs, but about the broader mechanics of belief in crypto markets. Specifically, it brought me back to a phrase that once defined entire cycles: Believe in something. It was more than a tagline. It was a rallying cry that captured the spirit of early crypto: a time when directional conviction was rare, tribalism was rewarded, and making a choice, any choice, was better than sitting on the sidelines. But here’s the problem: I don’t think that phrase works anymore. Worse, I think it quietly misleads in the current environment. Semantically, “believe in something” is open-ended. It doesn’t demand precision, only commitment. It suggests that belief, in and of itself, has value, regardless of what it’s directed toward. But in practice, the phrase has always carried an unspoken implication: it doesn’t mean believe in anything, it means believe in this. That ambiguity was useful in earlier cycles. Back then, crypto’s optionality was low. There were only a handful of viable bets. So when someone said believe in something, it was a dog whistle for what everyone already knew: we’re all rotating into the same trade. Liquidity had nowhere else to go. Belief had focus. And that focus created manias. But today’s market is different. Optionality is no longer constrained, it’s exploding. NFTs, ALTs, memecoins, DeFi, DePIN, AI, Etc. Every corner of the ecosystem has its own niche, its own believers, and its own liquidity pool. In that kind of environment, believe in something becomes counterproductive. It fragments attention & splinters capital. Everyone believes....but everyone believes in something else. That’s why we haven’t yet seen a singular, dominant mania this cycle. It’s not because people aren’t bullish. It’s because their belief is distributed. In a market defined by hyper-choice, belief without direction leads to diffusion, not concentration. And without concentration, there is no feedback loop of hype, FOMO, and reflexivity....just pockets of localized enthusiasm. If we want to see a full-blown vertical, a true liquidity supernova, the meta needs to shift from believe in something to believe in THIS. Not metaphorically. Literally. THIS must be clearly identifiable. A new sector, a new primitive, a new story. Because only then can attention and capital synchronize. Only then does reflexivity kick in. Only then do we get the kind of coordinated madness that marks every great top. There is nothing more beautiful than a new meta at the height of its mania. For a brief moment, everyone sees the same “this.” And for once, they all believe in it together. Let’s hope we get that before the cycle ends.

Thoughts.... Every time someone utters the phrase, “NFT season is about to start,” we are met with the same outcome: a slow bleed or an outright dump. It has become a ritual prediction (part hopeful, part delusional) that has reliably preceded disappointment since the original NFT cycle ended. And yet, each time, the believers return. Why? Because the phrase reveals more than it intends. It reveals a deep misunderstanding of what NFTs have become. Since the collapse of their original momentum, NFTs are no longer trading assets....they are luxury goods. And luxury is not purchased in anticipation of gain; it is purchased in the afterglow of it. People buy luxury when they feel invincible, when the scoreboard says they’re winning, or when fresh profits burn holes in their wallets. In markets, that moment is always near the top. Luxury signals abundance, not opportunity. And by the time people feel abundant, the opportunity has already passed. This is why every so-called “NFT season” post-2021 has been a local top. Because when NFTs resurface, they do not signal a new highs, they mark the end of one. They're what people buy after they’ve won, not what they use to win. There’s a deeper structural reason, too: there will never be another NFT season like the last. That meta wasn’t just a trading phenomenon....it was a cultural infiltration. NFTs became a narrative bridge between crypto and the Web2 world, pulling in fresh capital, social capital, and attention. That bridge has collapsed. And most of the money it brought in was extracted by the top before the music stopped. The harsh truth is that the gains used by today’s NFT buyers are trickle-down profits....waterfall gains passed down from institutions to natives. The funds set the stage. They rotated into strong hands, then smart hands, and eventually into enthusiastic hands. By the time those gains reach the NFT buyer, they’re at the bottom of the waterfall. But the bottom of the waterfall cannot trade luxury....it can only consume it. Because there’s no one else further down to sell it to. NFTs today are not instruments of upward mobility, they are artifacts of past euphoria. We’ll see how this plays out. But history suggests we already know.

🎱 Only buybacks + a flywheel can turn it around now.

Thoughts..... Discipline is not a virtue we possess, it is a consequence of what possesses us. We do not wake up with strength; we are pulled forward by purpose. And only a purpose strong enough can compel us to form the habit of doing what we’d rather avoid. We do not fail because we’re weak, we fail because the thing we say we want doesn’t weigh enough to move us through the things we don’t. The task is rarely the problem, the absence of a compelling why is. There’s a simple test for this. If your purpose cannot make you do the things you don’t like to do, then it isn’t a strong enough purpose. Because the uncomfortable truth is this: it is easier to adjust ourselves to the hardships of a poor living than it is to adjust ourselves to the hardships of making a better one. And we do it all the time. We tolerate jobs that drain us, relationships that numb us, patterns that shrink us....not because we prefer pain, but because we prefer familiar pain. We will go without things we deeply want just to avoid things we mildly dislike. This is what exposes the real source of our inaction: not a lack of willpower, but a lack of gravity in the goal. When the purpose is heavy enough, it drags discipline behind it. But when the purpose is light, even the smallest resistance becomes too much. You are not held by will...you are held by why.

Pump made a significant strategic error by selling part of their pre-sale allocation to institutional players. My sense is they were worried retail wouldn’t show up. The “Pump is an extractor” narrative had gained traction, and they panicked. So they did the usual: a pre-liquidity event roadshow to hedge the launch. But in doing so, they made a critical mistake. As I’ve said before, institutions rarely get opportunities like this. They were handed a pre-sale with guaranteed liquidity and the ability to lock in 25–40% returns within hours. Of course they took it, and dumped without hesitation. You can see it clearly in the order books. Now Pump is in the awkward position of needing to clean up that mess. They’re essentially using pre-sale capital to buy back tokens from the very institutions they onboarded, at a 25–40% premium. Instead of allocating those millions toward building the so-called Twitch killer, they’re spending it to patch the chart. And that’s where I start to lose confidence. I’ve never liked when teams prioritize chart optics over product, especially when the vision is this ambitious. Every dollar matters when you're trying to build something of this magnitude. This isn’t a space where you can afford to fight a two-front war....optics and execution. It’s making me question whether Pump is driven more by theatrics than actual conviction. Ironically, I’m debating whether to take a good position here....because if they’re going to keep caring more about the chart than the product, then I’d rather be positioned to catch the next wave of giveaways and flywheel spin. And I’m almost certain one is coming. Some “ecosystem” announcement, some faux-flywheel moment likely paired with another liquidity injection. This prices might be a solid entry, might even get better later today, if we see one more leg down. BUUUUUT There’s always the possibility they don’t even care enough for the performance anymore. That they just let the chart bleed out slowly, without resistance. Hmmm.