Proof of Story with Rob Sags

Sags and Jordan Horak of Cato Outdoors get into why great hunting dogs can solve problems humans barely understand, how instinct shows up in both dogs and business, and why some of the best outcomes come from operating without certainty. 

Here’s what you’ll get from this one: 

🔥 Why dogs can smell direction not just scent

🔥 The 3 percent odds behind winning nationals

🔥 Waking up in a cold sweat after ordering 700 Cato Boards

🔥 Why Perdiz hunting breaks American hunting instincts

🔥 How young dogs find more birds while acting completely insane

🔥 The difference between tracking scent and smelling birds in the air

🔥 Why Mel moving 200 cattle became the perfect puppy test

🔥 How COVID accidentally exploded the business

🔥 Why the best dogs solve problems handlers cannot even see

0:00 Intro

04:16 Winning Nationals and Building Cato Outdoors

11:10 Flying a Hunting Dog Into South America

16:34 Why Perdiz Hunting Feels Completely Different

21:02 Why Dogs Smell Directionally

26:30 The Death March Hunt

37:28 Reflections on Uruguay

Connect with Jordan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-horak-78280920

Cato Outdoors

https://catooutdoors.com/ 

Connect with Sags

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags and Thiago Rudiger of TheHUB get into why trading firms keep rebuilding the exact same infrastructure every time they enter a new market and why that cost still hasn’t been solved…

Here’s what you’ll get from this one:

🔥 Trading firms pay millions per market just to access the same setup

🔥 No shared infrastructure forces repeated capex across exchanges

🔥 TheHUB collapses multiple markets into one trading environment

🔥 Market makers immediately understand the cost advantage

🔥 Crypto VCs miss it because they never dealt with TradFi constraints

🔥 Access to data feeds like CME becomes a real bottleneck

🔥 Exchanges act as magnets that pull liquidity and participants

🔥 Brazil has strong technical talent but lacks venture capital depth

0:00 Intro

01:10 Career and Consulting Background

05:12 Institutional Crypto Research

07:13 Stablecoin Growth and Operations

12:23 Brazilian Builder Community

16:04 TheHUB Project and HFT

24:00 Data Center Growth and Global Expansion

Connect with Thiago Rudiger:

https://x.com/thiagorudiger

Connect with Sags

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags sits down with @WomanDefi (OG Fogo Community Member) who took a Fogo airdrop and turned it into clean water access for thousands of people in rural Pakistan. 

This conversation covers:

🔥 Turning airdrops into real world infrastructure instead of flipping

🔥 What crypto adoption actually looks like in regions still running on cash

🔥 The ground reality of communities spending hours just to access water

🔥 How small local teams execute faster than centralized orgs

🔥 Why trust and local ownership determine whether impact lasts

🔥 The gap between crypto narratives and actual use cases that matter

🔥 Starting with water before layering healthcare education and food security

🔥 Why most people still see crypto as a scam and what changes that

🔥 The role of mobile access versus cultural resistance in adoption

🔥 Building systems that empower instead of just distributing aid

0:00 Intro

0:19 The Airdrop Dinner With Family  

1:52 Crypto Adoption Reality in Pakistan  

6:12 Why She Didn’t Sell the Airdrop  

9:18 Turning an Airdrop Into Clean Water Infrastructure  

14:06 Crypto Use Cases That Actually Matter  

19:29 Purpose, Trust, and Building for Others 

Connect with @WomanDefi:

https://x.com/WomanDefi

Connect with Sags

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Jdot of Holo Hive breaks down how Korea’s crypto market actually behaves when everyone is aligned and reacting at the same time…

Here’s what builders and operators will pull from this conversation:

🔥 Long grind before going full time in Web3

🔥 Free alpha groups outcompeted paid ones by opening access to smaller players

🔥 Korea moves as a collective which amplifies both hype cycles and capital flow

🔥 Most teams confuse Web2 retail with actual Web3 natives and waste budget chasing the wrong users

🔥 Korean KOLs carry real accountability and can trigger direct project responses

🔥 The kimchi premium acts as a real time signal for retail participation

🔥 Currency weakness quietly pushes more users toward risk and crypto trading

🔥 Korean users don’t stay in one niche as they rotate across NFTs, trading, gaming and DeFi

🔥 Regulatory pressure is starting to reshape influencer marketing and affiliate models 

0:00 Intro

05:34 Entering Korea and Building Holo Hive

11:54 Mistakes Targeting Korea

17:39 KOL Accountability and Market Dynamics

23:05 Korea Regulations and Influencer Shift

28:35 Living in Seoul and Crypto IRL 

Connect with Jdot:

https://x.com/JdotHamilton

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags and Mike Cahill get into how Pyth hit the limits of its original model and had to rebuild the entire system around performance, licensing, and real revenue.

Here’s what builders, traders, and operators will pull from this conversation:

🔥 Why landing the biggest clients matters more than being the cheapest

🔥 How Pyth moved from public feeds to paid licensed data

🔥 Why 400 millisecond updates were never going to cut it

🔥 What Pyth Pro changes with one millisecond pricing

🔥 Why prediction markets are a natural fit for premium market data

🔥 How AI looks like another licensing mess waiting to be solved

🔥 Why revenue matters now more than market cap

🔥 What it takes to build 24 7 market feeds people will actually pay for

🔥 Why the hub matters if latency is the whole game

🔥 How Mike thinks about competition as permanent evolution

0:00 Intro

02:04 Why Revenue Matters More Now

07:13 Moving Beyond Blockchains Into Predictions and AI

10:12 The Marketplace and New Data Categories

16:30 Building by Iteration Not Master Plan

19:00 The Metric That Matters This Year

23:00 Why TheHUB Matters for Low Latency Data

26:00 Wrapping Pyth, FOGO, and TheHUB Together

Connect with Mike Cahill:

https://x.com/mdomcahill

Pyth:

https://www.pyth.network/ 

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags and Kain Warwick of Infinex walk through what actually broke in DeFi from Synthetix to token models to UX, and why most of it was self-imposed…

Here’s what you’ll get from this conversation:

🔥 Why early DeFi optimized for ideology instead of users

🔥 How decentralization constraints made products worse than BitMEX

🔥 The SNX debt pool nearly collapsing under leverage and liquidity pressure

🔥 What it feels like managing hundreds of millions in synthetic exposure

🔥 Why token markets turned fully PVP and lost long term holders

🔥 The missing piece that makes tokens actually investable

🔥 Why frontend UX is the real bottleneck in crypto adoption

🔥 How agents replace interfaces and remove product complexity entirely

🔥 Why L2s saved Ethereum and then became a drag on it

🔥 What changes when every user has trading agents as capable as HFTs

0:00 Intro

00:00 Synthetix Origins and Early Vision

00:44 Decentralization Ideology and Constraints

02:35 Centralization Reality With RWAs

04:30 Why Better Products Won

06:23 Zero Knowledge and the End State

09:44 SNX Leverage and System Risk

25:30 Collapse of Trust and Token Models

29:50 Starting Infinex After Synthetix

1:05:15 Agent Driven UX and the Future

Connect with Kain Warwick

https://x.com/kaiynne

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Jowe Stewart got into crypto through a random barbecue conversation and ended up building communities through ICO mania, Polkadot conviction, and now Fogo’s trading-first push as the market shifted under him.

Today Jowe and Sags sit down to discuss:

🔥 going from buying Litecoin at $2K Bitcoin to running ICO communities and defending tokens in Telegram

🔥 turning community grinding into a full agency working with dozens of projects before burning out

🔥 watching Polkadot believers push narratives while Solana wins on execution

🔥 how meme coins pulled in new users and wiped them out just as fast

🔥 why trust in crypto broke and why retail users never came back

🔥 the shift from narrative driven cycles to purpose built trading infrastructure

🔥 how Hyperliquid reset expectations for what traders actually need

🔥 building Fogo around speed liquidity and real trading behavior instead of ideology

🔥 what actually makes a crypto community stick and why most don’t

🔥 where crypto conversations moved after X lost influence and InfoFi collapsed

0:00 Intro

06:48 Polkadot and Early Conviction

09:28 Joining Fogo and Building Community

13:49 Meme Coins and Retail Damage

15:34 How Crypto Cycles Actually Evolve

21:14 Why Hyperliquid Won Early Traction

27:21 What Builds a Cult-Like Crypto Community

32:06 How Crypto Communities Changed

33:13 Why InfoFi Collapsed

35:10 Where Crypto Conversations Moved

41:15 Getting Involved with Fogo

Linktree? Telegram? https://linktr.ee/fogo_io

Connect with Jowe Stewart:

https://x.com/im_jowee

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags sits down with Cinder from Pyron to break down why borrow/lend hasn’t scaled…

Key takeaways:

🔥 Why most borrow/lend designs fail to scale due to fragmented liquidity

🔥 How looping amplifies exposure and why correlated assets change the risk

🔥 What Fire Mode does differently inside a single market

🔥 Why splitting markets creates hidden inefficiencies

🔥 How early liquidity bootstrapping actually works on new chains

🔥 Why UX is the hardest part of shipping new financial primitives

🔥 The gap between composability vision and current user flows

🔥 How seamless borrowing unlocks trading without exiting positions

🔥 Why solving fragmentation is the real growth unlock

0:00 Intro

01:19 Cinder’s Background and Path Into Borrow/Lend

05:10 How Borrowing and Lending Works

10:31 Looping Mechanics, Risk, and Liquidation

12:28 Fire Mode and Capital Efficiency

16:48 Composability and Ambient Integration

20:10 Pyron’s Long-Term Vision

Connect with Pyron:

https://x.com/PyronFi

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/

Sags and Doug Colkitt break down what actually determines “fairness” in perp exchanges once you separate execution, clearing, and settlement.

Here’s what builders and traders will pull from this conversation:

🔥 Why clearing and execution are treated as completely different systems

🔥 How latency only matters on execution and not settlement

🔥 What actually happens from order signing to matching to settlement

🔥 Why batch auctions run every 40 milliseconds instead of continuous matching

🔥 How oracle pegged orders replace fixed pricing assumptions

🔥 Why market makers get protected with single clearing prices

🔥 How quiet periods reduce toxic flow and stale quote sniping

🔥 Why pro rata replaces time priority inside auctions

🔥 How composability lets external protocols control margin and leverage

🔥 Why execution can move globally while settlement stays anchored

0:00 Intro

2:04 Architecture Overview

6:12 Trade Lifecycle

11:13 Matching Engine & Auctions

16:12 Price Formation & Market Dynamics

18:18 Front-Running Protection

23:52 On-Chain Settlement & Composability

28:03 Future Vision & Scaling

Connect with Doug Colkitt:

https://x.com/0xdoug

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/ 

Russ walks through the path from IoT engineer to DeFi builder and how that led to Valiant on Fogo–and why most of what people think matters in perps actually doesn’t.

Here’s what builders and traders will pull from this conversation:

🔥 What early Solana actually felt like when everyone was shipping at the same time

🔥 Why hackathon teams won money then immediately fell apart

🔥 What Serum taught builders about latency breaking on chain orderbooks

🔥 Why CLMMs work early but fall apart as real liquidity shows up

🔥 How prop AMMs win by updating faster and avoiding getting picked off

🔥 Why launching a perps front end now takes weeks not years

🔥 How Hyperliquid removes most of the backend burden for builders

🔥 Why the hard part is still risk management and liquidity not UI

🔥 Why owning the user matters more than owning the liquidity

🔥 How the best products now get built directly with user feedback

0:00 Intro

00:26 From Engineer to Crypto Builder

02:05 Early Crypto and First Trades

06:57 Going Full Time Into DeFi

08:52 Early Solana Competition and Energy

10:52 AMMs and CLMMs Basics

14:15 Prop AMMs Explained

22:56 Building a Perps Front End with Hyperliquid

34:20 Community-Driven Product Development

Check out Valiant:

https://valiant.trade/

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/