Who the F*** is DeeZe?

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This is a little back story on me, where I came from, and how I got to where I am today. Why am I the way I am type shit.

The Beginning
_{^{High School sweethearts jump into marriage and baby DeeZe jumps out.}}

I dropped into the world during the early 90s, in the middle of a dilapidated rustbelt suburb. Draw a line between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Put a dot in the middle. That’s where I grew up.

Mom is a hairdresser, Dad is a maintenance man and ex-navy. They split when I was a year old. Luckily, they always set aside their differences to give me the best shot possible in life.

From a young age, I was fascinated with games. I would beg and plead with any and every family member to sit down and play Monopoly, Sorry, Life, and other classic board games we had around the house. Always hyper competitive, I quickly realized I was much more brains than brawns from my early days in school.

During second grade, I broke my right arm. I got my cast off and 2 weeks later I broke it again, 2cm away from the first break. My arm hasn’t been right since. At this time in my life, I got my hands on my first video game console which was a PlayStation 1. I was addicted early, but the PS1 was at my dad’s house and I only saw him every two weeks so I couldn’t binge game quite yet.

Some of my first games included Test Drive 4x4, WWF SmackDown, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot and Gex. Test Drive and WWF allowed me to compete against my dad, and I was quickly better than him. He gave up playing video games with me shortly after. ⚰️

Online Multiplayer Obsession

The thrill of winning a video game is an addicting feeling(always has been.) While I was still in elementary school, I wanted to spend all of my free time at my friends’ houses playing their N64s and competing against them in Smash Brothers and Mario Kart. We didn’t have any way to play with each other online, or so we thought.

One day, we were watching Cartoon Network and saw an advertisement to redeem a gToon which was essentially a digital trading card. I begged my mom to use the family computer and made an account to claim gToons shortly after seeing the ad. Addiction runs in the family, and I was quickly addicted to battling others with my deck of gToons.

I talked two of my best friends into joining Cartoon Orbit and shortly after we were hogging the phone lines from our chatty moms for 6 hours a day while grinding ranked games. I climbed faster and higher than my friends and started to realize maybe I was built differently.

I found my first online forum (shoutout invisionfree) and started making friends with other people who played Cartoon Orbit seriously. There was a team of the best players called The Harbingers and I would stalk all of their forum posts to learn about the best strategies. I realized early on that I was one of the youngest people in the community (wasn’t even a teenager at the time) and leaned into pseudonymity to blend in.

After a couple years of my Cartoon Orbit obsession, I was ready to move on. Cartoon Orbit was dying and shortly after I quit, it got cancelled by Cartoon Network. One of my best friends was playing Socom 3 online with the chunky fat ethernet adapter for the PlayStation 2 and showed me how it worked one day at his house. I didn’t have enough money to buy Socom 3 + the adapter right away but we did a lil scheming aka saving every dollar my parents would give to me. A month later, I took all of my money and aped in.

Playing public ranked matches and trying to climb was a losing effort. There was no anti-cheat and essentially all of the top 250 ranked players were using a piece of software called CodeMagic that fit on a USB drive and when combined with the Pelican CodeBreaker allowed them a whole plethora of cheats like invincibility, invisibility, infinite jump, unlimited ammo, no recoil, etc.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em was the motto. I saved up some money from chores + holidays and bought my own setup to cheat so I could get on the leaderboards. Within a few weeks, I was in the top 250, had a badass 4 star rank, ridiculous KDA, and more.

I learned a very important lesson at a young age because of this.

After this revelation, I realized that playing the public ranked matches was a waste of time. Luckily, one of my friends told me about a website called socombattles.com which was a blossoming new community full of competitive gamers with their own leaderboards, competitive settings, and forums. We got our asses kicked by players way better than us over and over, and we leveled up quickly this way. Another valuable lesson was learned:

While I was firmly entrenched in the PlayStation ecosystem, other friends were showing off their Xboxes and a game called Halo 2. At first, I didn’t get the hype and couldn’t imagine buying another console + another game + another yearly subscription. There was no way my family could afford it, and it would take me another year+ of saving to get it.

Around this time, I got my first taste of RuneScape as well. I spent most of my time running laps from the Varrock mines to the Lumbridge furnace back to the Varrock banks. I hated quests and wasn’t able to wear a rune platebody for years.

RuneScape taught me many important life lessons, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Concepts such as delaying gratification, digital veblen goods, and basic economic principles were being ingrained into my worldview as a pre-teen. I learned more about supply and demand, opportunity cost, and portfolio + risk management from RuneScape than anywhere else.

Major League Gaming

Everything changed when I was watching USA TV one day and saw Major League Gaming. There were kids (and adults) between the ages of 12-30 traveling across the country to play competitive Halo for tens of thousands of dollars. How the hell was this possible? I could get good enough at video games to make money?! I’m all-in.

(Pretty sure this was the exact episode I watched 👇)

I knew I needed an Xbox and the 360 had just been released. Games were backwards compatible, so I could buy a 360 and play both Halo 2 and the new Halo coming out in the near future, Halo 3.

I started working aka landscaping for all of my family members and neighbors, and after a summer, I had saved up enough to buy everything I needed just in time for Halo 3’s release.

Halo 3 forced me to branch out of my irl friend group to find better teammates. This ended up being a critical experience for me, as I realized limiting myself to a pool of 200~ kids from school as potential teammates wasn’t going to help me become who I wanted to be.

From Halo 3 to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2007-2012) I spent every minute of free time playing a console FPS with a focus on trying to be a pro. Upon some archival digging, I found one of my old GB accounts that had my MW3 ranked record on it. I was good enough to win 75% of my ranked matches, but I wasn’t good enough to be on a top 16 team in any game.

Being pretty good but not pretty great was a tough spot to be in mentally. I felt like I was so close, but so far away from realizing my dreams. I had blown off my school work and didn’t care about ACT/SAT scores while grinding. Luckily, I had parents who cared and pushed me to at least be an honors student with a decent ACT score. No one in my immediate family had graduated from college, hell some were even high school dropouts, so it was important for them that I made it further than they did.

I only applied to one college because I knew where I wanted to go and knew I had the credentials to get in. I was going to be a Buckeye starting Fall 2012. 🥳I graduated high school and received $2000 from all of my family members which was more money than I ever had. Of course, the first thing I did was build a computer.

I had been using the same family computer from 2002 until 2012, and couldn’t play World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Starcraft, and the other big PC games, which is a big reason why I stuck to RuneScape as my PC game of choice in-between competitive FPS binges. Now that I had a solid gaming computer, I was ready to move on from console FPS as I felt like I had already peaked.

It didn’t help that during senior year of high school I got into RuneScape boxing matches which were essentially 50/50 coin flips where you could wager any amount of in game currency. I had turned a few hundred million gp into a few billion gp over the course of a few months and felt invincible.

Then one day, the impossible happened. I lost 13 boxing matches in a row (imagine flipping a coin and getting tails 13 times in a row!) I lost everything I had spent years accumulating over the course of one night. We learned another important lesson, this one on bet sizing and risk management.

League of Legends and Losing it All

I downloaded League during the summer of 2012, during Season 2. I finished Season 2 in Silver and was absolutely addicted. The rush of winning and watching my rank climb brought me back to my Halo 3 days. I spent every waking moment thinking about LoL and how I could get better. I’d spend my days and nights watching Dyrus, OddOne, WingsOfDeath, QTpie, Nyjacky, Saintvicious, Scarra, etc., trying to figure out all of the things the pros did differently than the players in my ranks. I’d dive deep in SoloMid builds, take notes on all of my favorite champs, and eventually I committed to top lane. Ended up falling in love with Shen, Singed, Renekton, Shyvana, Mundo, and Hecarim.

By the time Season 3 ended, I was floating around 10-20 LP in Diamond 1. At the time, Challenger only had 50 slots and there was no Masters tier. When I made it into D1, I would win 1-2 LP a game and lose 4-6. For the first time in my PC gaming career, I was getting matched with pros and semi-pros. Little did I know at the time, but this would be the peak rank I’d achieve…

Remember when I said I was accepted into Ohio State and a Buckeye as of Fall 2012? I committed to Computer Science and Engineering, even though I had zero programming experience or even a rudimentary understanding of what a CSE degree would entail. In my pursuit of League of Legends ranks, I left my grades in the dust. I was originally receiving a significant amount of grants due to my mom’s low income level, but after the Spring 2013 semester I had a 1.8 GPA and lost all of my financial aid.

This was the lowest I’ve ever felt in my life. I had hidden the truth and lied to my parents for all of freshman year…”grades are good, professors are great, I’m doing really well” I’d tell them anytime they asked. I thought about killing myself too many times because the idea of admitting I failed and lied to them was unbearable. I had never fucked up this hard before and didn’t know how to react to failure.

I drove home after the semester ended and had to come clean to my parents. I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face when I told him the truth. He wasn’t angry or mad, but the solemn disappointment hit 10x+ harder than whatever reaction I was imagining. The only way I could get my aid back was by getting my GPA back over a 2.5 and that was going to take 1-2 semesters with no aid to get there. I promised him I would get my shit together, and he co-signed on a predatory 9% APR Sallie Mae loan to help me fund my sophomore year.

That same summer, I started working a job as a fencing assistant making $9 an hour for a family friend. I helped with everything from dismantling old fences to running wire, driving posts with tractor mounted hydraulic presses, and whatever other grunt work that needed done.

My average day, Monday through Friday, was:
_{5:00am - wake up and get ready
5:30am - drive to my boss’s house
6:00am - load up truck + trailer with all supplies necessary for today’s job
7:00am - arrive at job site, start working
Noon- lunch
5pm - wrap up working
6pm - get back to boss’s house, unload truck
7pm - get back home, eat dinner, and prepare for the next day}

This schedule was hell, I had basically no free time for any hobbies, and I knew I would never last if my job was hard physical labor from dawn until dusk.

Meeting Mrs. Deeze

During the summer of 2013 I didn’t have much free time, but I still found time to login to League every day for a game or two. One day, my friend (shoutout Cody) invited me to play a normal game. I really wanted to go to bed but said fuck it, let’s run one more. Cody’s internet disconnected and we FF’d the game in 20 minutes. Typical.

Except it was anything but typical. There was another person in the game he invited, let’s call her “Lilly.” We didn’t say anything to each other in the game and we weren’t in voice chat, just a mutual Skype chat. Of course, I sent her a friend request. Girl gamers aren’t real, and if they are real they’re a pro hoe, or so I thought.

Apparently I forgot my Skype account linked to my Twitter where I was doxxed and even had a shirtless pic in my recent media tab. Lilly saw enough to know I was real and accepted my request. On the other hand, I couldn’t find Lilly anywhere. She was a ghost. No Instagram, no Twitter, no Facebook, wtf?!

We started talking almost every day about any and everything. I felt like I made a life-long friend but had only known her for a few weeks. Sometime during this period, I asked for some proof of social media just to verify she was real. The next thing you know, we were talking on video and she was definitely real.

We met online in June, and when late August rolled around I had to go back to Columbus for the school year. First day back to campus, I’m hanging out with my roommates on our porch, and they notice I’m glued to my phone and not fully present with them. They say in jest “who are you talking to so much?!” and I spurt out “my girlfriend” before I could even think.

Immediately, I tell Lilly “Hey, so I told my friends you’re my girlfriend…what do you think about that?” and after what felt like a lifetime, she responded back with something like “I guess, we act like boyfriend and girlfriend so that makes sense” and the rest is history.

Lilly came to visit Ohio a few months later and the chemistry was even stronger than it was online. I knew from then on that persevering through a long distance relationship for a couple years with trips to see each other every 3-6 months would be worth it in the end, and it was. She’d come visit for a month at a time during the summer months and would even come to the library with me during my work hours to vibe.

She moved to Ohio three years after we met, and I proposed that week. Ever since, she’s been everything I could ask for in a life partner and more. This year marks our 10th year anniversary and we’re more in love with each other today than we’ve ever been.

Daily Fantasy Sports, The Crypto Rabbithole, and Losing It All…Again.

One of the most common questions I’m asked is “How did I fall into the Crypto Rabbithole?” or some variation of how I got started in the space.

Let’s teleport back to 2014. I’m a sophomore at OSU. I'm still spending a good amount of free time playing video games, boosting players in League from silver to gold or platinum for a couple hundred dollars per job as my side hustle. The painstaking grind of pubstomping ranked duos with another smurf over and over again is grating on me, but I don’t have any other skills that I can monetize, or so I think.

I start seeing ads for DraftKings and FanDuel while watching sporting events and they pique my interest. I deposit $10 into Fanduel and create a lineup for the upcoming weekend NFL games and that lineup wins $100. Once again, I’m immediately addicted to something I’ve gotten lucky at on my first try (seems to be a semi-recurring theme in my life.)

Next thing I know, I’m on RotoGrinders signing up for the premium membership trial. I have browser extensions to help me find fish (not experienced players) in FanDuel and DraftKings H2H lobbies. My new obsession is the NBA. I’m waking up and watching news blurbs like a hawk. I’m in some janky web-based chat rooms talking strategy with the guys at Fantasy Team Advice. I’m reading and listening to every piece of content I can get my hands on, whether it is Peter Jennings, Adam Levitan, Evan Silva, Mike Gallagher, Drew Dinkmeyer, JMToWin, El Jefe, christ I was even listening to Siege religiously back then.

After a few years of grinding my cock off in NBA and NFL, I had maybe $5000 profit to show for it, but it felt incredible to make money “without a job.” Though if I had worked another part-time job with the time I devoted to DFS, I would’ve made more than $5000.

I learned I wasn’t great at DFS and probably would never be one of the winning players with insane ROIs, and that was fine with me. Opportunity cost is a bitch but I learned some important lessons during the DFS grinding years, such as focusing on process > results.

At the start of the 2017 NBA Season, people in my DFS group chats are talking about how much money they’ve made off of Ethereum and Bitcoin. I knew I was a better DFS player than half of them, and the fact they were making more money gambling on cryptocurrency than any of us were playing DFS was enough to force me to jump in.

I had a friend on Old School RuneScape who had been begging me to care about Bitcoin since 2014 (shoutout JSut) and I had written him off with justifications like “I have a drug dealer a block away that I pay cash, I don’t need to buy drugs online” and “Why would I want to download this wallet shit when I can just use PayPal?” but this time was different. I saw too many people talking about these cryptocurrencies in 2017 to keep ignoring them.

I did what any respectable degenerate would do. Copy traded the people making redacted money. I dipped my toes into Litecoin, buying one LTC while visiting my in-laws for Thanksgiving.

Within three weeks, I had taken everything out of my DraftKings and FanDuel accounts and bought more Litecoin and Ethereum. Within a few more weeks, all of that money quintupled and I felt like a genius. I had some nice wins on XRB, XRP, TRX, and other shitcoins. Delusional euphoria quickly took over and I thought I’d be a millionaire in a few months with the ability to quit my job, buy a house, and never work “a real job” ever again. Clearly I didn’t learn my lesson after losing my RuneScape bank years earlier.

A reality check was needed, and it came over the course of 2018. I had gotten into leverage trading on BitMEX and was determined to make it all back. Spending the year leverage longing every single move while Bitcoin went from $20K to $3K was a recipe for ruin and by November 2018 I was ruined. Not only was all of the profit gone, but so was the fresh money I was putting into the ecosystem each paycheck.

I became depressed and borderline suicidal again. I hadn’t felt this way since failing my classes freshman year of college and losing my aid. I thought I blew my one and only chance out of 30 years of wage slavery. Luckily, I was in a Discord group with many other degenerates who were in a similar boat with me. We’d start each day with a depressing Wojak meme instead of gm.

During this bear market, I met some of my now best friends in the space from this Discord group. Trill, Blockhead, Soby, Shower, and more familiar faces became some of my closest online friends. We were all coping together. From group cope, hope emerged. Maybe, just maybe, if we applied ourselves and did a little learning about personal finance, risk management, compounding, and markets we could make it all back and more…

I started binge listening to the Invest Like the Best Podcast by Patrick O’Shaughnessy because I followed him and his dad Jim on Twitter and they seemed like intelligent and open-minded chads. During this time I also started consuming a lot of free material around the CFA (Certified Financial Advisor) program.

I knew I didn’t want to be a CFA, but the material was helpful in wrapping my head around important concepts that I had little to no academic exposure to before. I had some of these concepts loosely developed in my head from playing a ton of RuneScape, but I didn’t have the definitions to things like opportunity cost, compound interest, discounted cash flow, portfolio + risk management, etc. until reading over this material.

A few months after losing it all again, I came up with a plan to dollar cost average a few hundred dollars from each paycheck into ETH and later on XTZ (6% baking rewards were too good to ignore.) This was all the extra money I had left after my bills were paid for every month. I knew if this bet went to $0, at least Mrs. Deeze was saving a similar amount each month for a future house down payment. The safety and security our relationship provided for me to take risks was vital for surviving long enough to get lucky.

The Pandemic, Uniswap Summer, and CryptoPunks

In March of 2020, the pandemic hit hard and my job turned from a 9-5 office job into a 9-5 mostly remote job, which changed the course of my life forever. At first, markets dumped HARD and it really felt like we could go to zero. Then after a few months, it was clear we weren’t going to zero and there were some actual interesting developments in the crypto space, specifically in the ETH ecosystem.

Uniswap Summer (July-September 2020) was a beautiful time to be alive and dialed into the Ethereum ecosystem. Taking everything I had learned from previous lessons to heart, I made a new wallet and sent 2 ETH to it (ETH was $200~ at the time.) I told myself that I could lose this ETH and it wouldn’t matter, but I wouldn’t refill the wallet with more ETH until next month.

I put 2 ETH into a fresh token called $ALEPH and it ripped 6x over the course of two weeks. I was absolutely hooked. My days quickly became 12+ hours of telegram and twitter sleuthing trying to find “the next 10x” and luckily I managed to find a couple (shoutout TEND, XAMP, WAIF, and more.)

Yield Farming had become the flavor of the month shortly after, with YFI making several of my friends rich over the course of a few weeks. We were farming YAMS, PASTA, KIMCHI, SAKE, SUSHI and more into September 2020.

Around this time, my friend Trill, told me to buy a Zombie punk and that he was going to buy one. They were 30 ETH ($15,000) at the time and that would’ve been more than 50% of my Uniswap Summer profits. I told him he was crazy and that I knew better (I had self studied risk management for crying out loud.)

I ended up buying CryptoPunk #8861 shortly after talking with Trill. This punk reminded me of Johnny Bravo and I thought he was pretty Chad. The market started to move a bit after only a few days and I realized I wanted a hoodie punk more so I listed him and he sold the same day.

I fell in love with trading Punks and engaging with the Punks community in discord. I was spending 8+ hours a day in the discord from Q4 2020 to Q2 2021 and it is where I met some of my favorite people like Snowfro, Von Mises, 0x113d, Claire Silver, HEEE, purphat, Geebz, Bobby0x, B1gnay, Chris Ferchill, Straybits, Zoli, Derek Edwards, Beautyandthepunk, Jez, Peter Jennings, M Shadows, Syn Gates, and so many more.

Getting to meet people who I had been following for years like Peter Jennings from Daily Fantasy Sports and Matt + Syn from Avenged Sevenfold was the ultimate mind fuck. These were some of my idols and now they’re asking for my advice about CryptoPunks?!? If only I knew how crazy things could get over the next year.

Minting Early Art Blocks + Denominating Portfolio in Punks

Right before I learned what a Chromie Squiggle was, I had just spent a few ETH on sealed Hidden Fates and Champion Path Pokémon cards to rip open. The thrill of ripping packs is a rush I’ve been chasing since I was a 5 year old in Wal-mart begging my mom to buy a pack on the way out, and I finally made it to a point in my life where I could buy a few booster packs with absolutely zero regrets.

Snowfro shared his love for generative art with us in the Punks discord. He was never pushy and you could tell he genuinely loved what he was doing. His passion was contagious and it was impossible to ignore if you spent any time around him. I don’t think Snowfro has gotten a good night’s sleep since January 2021. 🤣

It was a no-brainer to mint whatever he was working on, even if I didn’t fully understand the importance at the time. Minting Art Blocks felt like ripping Pokémon packs on steroids. We knew kind of what we could get, but we never knew for sure.

Art Blocks started minting on November 27th, 2020. My first Chromie Squiggle mint was on November 28th, 2020. I ended up minting 41 Squiggles total before Snowfro closed the minting window on January 16th, 2021.

On January 1st, 2021, Singularity by Hideki Tsukamoto released. This was the first Art Blocks mint I was mentally prepared to mint multiples of from the second it went live. I was able to mint 20 over the course of the 40 minute mint window. My first mint was #12, the large red piece in the bottom right of the screenshot below. I felt so lucky and knew I had to keep minting.

After this mint, there were vicious gas wars for almost every FCFS (first come first serve) generative mint for the next few months. Archetypes, Ringers, Fidenza, and more iconic collections dropped over this period of time.

I had this crazy plan at the time where, if Squiggles went to 0.5 ETH, I would sell a good chunk of my stack and it would cover the cost basis of every other Art Block I had minted or bought.

This plan ended up being both brilliant and painful, but at least I trusted it. Brilliant in the sense that after selling my first batch of Squiggles, I could breath and sleep soundly at night. Painful in the sense that Squiggles would run to $30,000+ a piece over the next six months and I wouldn’t sell enough.

Luckily for me, in Q1 of 2021 I decided that owning DeFi shitcoins wasn’t the move and I started denominating my portfolio in floor Punks instead. I realized I had a significantly better edge trading Punks and I was having the time of my life in the Punks discord.

When all was said and done, I ended up making somewhere around 400 ETH profit from trading Punks while still retaining my 3D Pipe Hoodie, VR Blonde, and Albino Pipe Smile.

Joining Fractional, Falling in Love with Art, and Becoming a Patron

2021 Summer is all a blur in hindsight. I started off the summer by leaving my mid-level IT job for the state to join Fractional, a new startup co-founded by Andy8052 and CryptoSamurai focused on creating a protocol which allowed people to create ERC-20s out of their ERC-721s.

I joined the team as the “Director of Vibes” and was one of the first five employees. I was responsible for growing, educating and managing the community, power using the protocol to break it + suggest improvements, and anything else that came up.

During my first few months at Fractional, I went from < 10K followers to 50K+. I spent at least half of my day hosting Twitter Spaces like Lindy Walks where I’d bring up anyone who requested and talk to them about literally anything.

At first, spaces were a simple way for me to connect with friends for short periods of times to talk about recent developments in NFTs or DeFi. After a few weeks, prices started exploding and spaces started to become ground zero for all information related to NFTs.

If there was a new mint or hot collection going up in price, we were talking about it in spaces. We’d have project founders and whales on stage talking about their conviction in what they’re building/buying. It was a live way to gather + assess information to speculate on.

During this crazy summer, I hosted a space with my friend Justin Aversano which changed everything for me. About an hour in, Justin suggested that I bring up the Canadian adventurer Cath Simard to talk about her SuperRare genesis collection. We spent the next 4 hours talking about her adventures in the Canadian Rockies, giving up life in the modeling business to be a banana farmer in Australia, returning to certain caves over and over again to capture different nightscapes to composite them into one single vision, and many more facets of her creative journey.

(this space was recorded and it is available 👇)

You see, up until this point in time, I only had a few pieces of 1/1 art in my collection, including a Twin Flames by Justin. I didn’t think of myself as much of an art collector, even though I was amassing quite the collection of Art Blocks and Punks.

After hosting the space with Cath, I felt a deep connection with her work that I had never felt with any other art before. It was like a whole new world was shown to me during that space, a world full of adventure, perseverance, frustration, craftmanship, narrative building, and love.

I ended up buying PERSÉVÉRANCE from her genesis collection, and later on traded one of the Chromie Squiggles I minted for Blueth. Both prints have been proudly hanging next to each other in our home and they have sparked many passionate conversations with our guests since. One friend liked Cath’s work so much after talking to me that she ended up picking up her own framed print too. I’ve found moments like this to be the ones I cherish the most as a collector.

From August 2021 onwards, I ended up collecting more than 500 pieces of art from 200 different artists spanning a wide range of genres while hosting thousands of hours of spaces talking to everybody I could possibly connect with. I’ve been able to collect a significant amount of work that resonates with me while supporting some of my favorite people alive.

I’ve also made some substantial errors, such as poor judgement of character and collecting too much work from too many artists. There were many scenarios where I should’ve been building depth rather than breadth, but we did a little learning and adjusting going forward.

I’ll talk about what I’ve learned from art collecting in a future article.

Most (but not all) of my collection can be seen here → https://deca.art/deeze/bestofdeeze

Where am I now?

In May 2023, Fractional ended up shutting down and returning funds to investors. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, this ended up being the right decision for the company.

I’m honestly at a point in life where I feel practically unemployable so I haven’t agreed to any full time positions since. 🤣

In the meantime, I’ve re-focused on investing in the crypto markets, promoting We Do A Little Pod, the premiere in person only podcast at the intersection of technology and art, and advising companies working on problems I love to solve founded by people I love.

What to expect from this newsletter?

I’m going to drop a new article when I feel like it

Topics will include a mix of recent events + evergreen think pieces.

Of course I’ll plug any exciting things I have going on like NOT DRUGS bags coming back for sale, or any new podcast episodes.

If there are any topics you’d like to suggest I write about, please feel free to let me know by leaving a comment or e-mailing [email protected] 🫡🫡

Acknowledgements

I wouldn’t be here without the relentless support and undying love from Mrs. Deeze. Thank you for always believing in me, especially when no one else was.

Special thanks to Jon Triest for pushing me to write about myself even when I thought what I had to share wasn’t interesting and writing about myself would be narcissistic. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to write something like this without him providing the spark.

Special thanks to Aniko Berman for providing another friendly nudge to release this piece while I was visiting NYC last month. Your patience and thoughtfully present questions enhanced the quality of this piece significantly.

Special thanks to Ben Roy and Simon Goldberg for pushing me as well and providing helpful feedback to get this piece across the finish line.