Re:Envisioning Web3 | 1-1 Fireside Chat with Jed and J.P. MoreGainz

Lyss welcomed the room, noted "Elon is in a mood today" so there was no purple pill, and pointed everyone to the rescreen link to share the Space manually. The pre-show was a full motivational set — the ET sermon at 12:01 through 16:06 ran hot enough that Jed came out of it saying he listens to one every day.

"Most of the time we have like founders on here, but JP got a story to tell, and I really want to talk to him." He'd hung out with J.P. twice at the restaurant in two weeks. SLICK RIC at 17:41 added that these story spaces are his favorites, and that from the birthday trivia night he'd already clocked J.P. as dangerously smart. Jed, concurring: "The dude can break my brain, bro."

Theater major at Northwestern, performance then set/lighting/sound design, then a hard look at the economics of the industry — once a show closes you're between jobs. The hinge moment: flipping channels and spotting Anthony Scaramucci, whose kids he'd done chorus and theater with, on CNBC. "I didn't understand half of what he was talking about, but I was very interested." He read his way into the jargon, landed a software-testing internship at a mortgage analytics firm, taught himself Python, and got pulled into the quant desk.

A long, patient walkthrough of why Fannie and Freddie failed — lenders offloading credit risk the moment a loan closed, Alt-A collateral quietly creeping between prime and subprime, house price appreciation papering over the losses. Jed, who spent 15 years on Wall Street, offered the floor view at 39:40: "They gave everybody money knowing they're gonna pay it... I feel like you're trying to like sugarcoat a little bit what happened."

His core thesis: post-QE, agency MBS are "effectively just glorified treasuries" with no credit risk to the end investor. A borrower who defaults loses his home; the bondholder just gets paid back early — and in a rising-rate environment that's actually good for the bondholder. "It used to be the case that investors and borrowers' interests were kind of perfectly aligned." That misalignment is why hard money and on-chain collateral appealed to him 54:52.

The emotional center of the crypto half. In 2020 J.P. sold most of his gold and silver, bought BTC and ETH, and talked his father — commercial real estate debt, 63 years old — into some. He's still holding. Later 1:03:12, when the MegaETH ICO was gated behind accredited-investor rules J.P. didn't meet, he asked to invest through his dad's credentials, and his dad not only agreed but asked to be put down for some himself. "He didn't give me money, he just gave me the opportunity to invest my own money in the way that I wanted to."

Despite being in crypto since his early 20s, he had nobody to talk to about it — no friends, no colleagues at the mortgage firm, just a couple of people making altcoin punts for a quick buck. He traces his November entry into NFTs directly to that loneliness, and at 1:13:05 described the Cryptopunks brunch in Palo Alto: "I felt complete, I felt like I was with my people."

Lyss, after listening to him narrate a V1 punk, a mutant ape, a bored ape, a good vibes club, a crypto dickbutt, Orkhan pieces and finally the punk in his PFP, had to step in: "I'm just dying here because you said I kind of caught the bug... Yeah, we know that's not true." Jed's addendum at 1:16:42: for all of it, "you've got more utility from regens than... your crypto punk, more than your bored ape."

J.P. laid it out plainly: a hemorrhagic stroke back in December at 31, blamed at the time on 12–13 hour days and all-nighters, with a small permanent loss of upper-left peripheral vision. Two weeks before the Space, with the blood finally drained enough for a clear MRI, they found a golf-ball-sized, well-defined, slow-growing tumor in the visual processing region. Surgery is May 11. He weighed it against the fact that this is simultaneously one of the happiest stretches of his adult life, and asked the room not to worry — then opened his DMs to anyone dealing with something similar.

SLICK RIC asked permission, then prayed for J.P. by name, closing with the line that landed hardest: "let him know that there is real people in Web3." He followed it with a rundown of how the regulars actually check on each other — a FaceTime with Woof, calls with Jed, calls with Lyss — and offered J.P. his personal phone number.