Cobo co-founder Disco Fish discussed investing, Bitcoin, DeFi, AI agents and questions of personal purpose in a recent conversation with Jin Ming, founder of Jilian Technology. The exchange centered on how his thinking has changed over time, from market practice to long-term judgment, and how AI is reshaping both execution and cognition.
DeFi as a compressed course in financial history
Disco Fish said he sees DeFi as a practical field for understanding finance. In his view, mechanisms such as lending, market making and liquidity mining are, at their core, new attempts to answer questions that traditional finance has already answered in earlier forms. Participating directly in protocols is, for him, a way to move through what amounts to centuries of financial product evolution in a very short period of time.
That is why DeFi has value for him beyond investment opportunity alone. He said it pushed him to go back and study financial history and theory. His investment framework, he added, did not exist in complete form at the beginning. What emerged later was closer to a loop: practice first, accumulate experience in real markets, abstract rules from outcomes, build a framework, then train that framework into intuition.
The key, in his account, is not to begin with a finished theory and apply it mechanically. It is to keep raising questions through action, then use those questions to fill gaps in theory and historical understanding.
As AI cuts execution costs, direction and will become more important
Disco Fish said AI is sharply reducing the distance between an idea and implementation. In the past, many ideas stalled because execution costs were simply too high. Now, with knowledge, tools and action compressed into the hands of individuals, a clearly defined "seed" can be tested quickly.
He argued that the stronger the technology becomes, the more important human direction, judgment and the will to keep acting become. But a wider field of possibility also creates more confusion for builders. AI opens up what he described as an almost unlimited executable space, making the choice of what to work on the harder problem.
He said that during the mining era he once had a strong sense of mission and a strong urge to create. Today, he feels more uncertain and has not yet found a direction that is large enough and systematic enough. Even so, he still sees himself as a builder. One part of existence, as he put it, is to bring into the world possibilities that did not previously exist.
AI agents are moving beyond efficiency tools into cognitive support
Disco Fish also said he has deeply embedded AI and agents into daily life. On the information-input side, work such as reading original long-form texts, filtering materials and compressing them into PPT decks is handled by a note-taking system he built himself based on evolutionary thinking, along with an AI-curated daily briefing.
For daily interaction and assisted cognition, he said he uses three agents with different roles. One is focused on instrumental rationality and provides highly rational action plans and decision suggestions. Another is softer and more feminine in style, handling emotional analysis and empathy, and at one point told him he "might have death anxiety." The third is designed to surface blind spots, using his historical information and personal behavior to identify areas he may be missing.
In his telling, agents have already gone beyond the role of a standard assistant. They are becoming a form of companion-like external cognition, processing information and tasks while also participating in emotional support, blind-spot correction and the building of a second thinking system.
Core assets must have large enough long-term value space
On investing, Disco Fish said his first principle for screening core assets is that the total addressable market, or TAM, must be large enough, and that the asset must be tied to a macro vision capable of supporting a long holding period. In other words, he is not only looking for short-term upside. He wants assets that could help shape the technological, financial or social structure of the next decade or longer.
He described a three-layer position-management process: start with a small position for discovery, raise allocation through continued validation, and only after the long-term vision becomes clear move into the core phase, where the position may rise to around 20%.
By that standard, he said, only Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tesla have fully passed the test so far. SpaceX is still in the observation and timing stage.
He added that Ethereum’s place in his core holdings is being reassessed. The new test, he said, is whether Ethereum can become infrastructure for the operation and coordination of AI agents. If it can carry the new demands of a machine economy, Ethereum may keep its core status. If it cannot, the original investment logic would need to be reconsidered.
"Bitcoin is better gold"
Comparing gold and Bitcoin, Disco Fish framed the difference as a contest between two paradigms and two camps: "digital currency + AI" on one side, and "gold + industrial manufacturing power" on the other. He said "Bitcoin is better gold," and argued that the deepest reason is its complete lack of intermediaries and the asset-disposal rights it gives to sovereign individuals.
Traditional gold, in his description, usually requires layers of intermediaries and custodial institutions to establish ownership and liquidity. Bitcoin does not rely on any intermediary for the individual to gain full control and dispose of the asset independently. That, he said, is what real personal asset sovereignty looks like.
He also said there are two technologies that materially strengthen the capabilities of sovereign individuals. BTC changes how individuals control and transfer assets, allowing value to be self-custodied and moved outside traditional institutions. AI expands the boundary of individual capability, enabling one person to complete knowledge and execution work that previously required an organization. One strengthens asset sovereignty; the other amplifies personal productivity.
A philosophy of fewer assets, understood more deeply
Disco Fish said he does not fully agree with the traditional portfolio-allocation approach that uses low-correlation assets such as gold, equities and Bitcoin to reduce volatility. Human cognition and attention are limited, he said, and the number of assets a person can truly understand in depth is small.
So rather than buying gold he does not understand simply to satisfy a diversification model, his approach is closer to "fewer assets, deeper understanding." In his view, defensiveness does not come from owning more categories of assets, because correlation tends to converge under extreme conditions. In a real systemic crisis, assets that appear to offset one another often fall together or behave in the same way.
Under that logic, diversification may work in unusually stable markets, but its effect weakens when the market runs into what he called a real "disaster."