How to Get Rich Playing GTA 6 | Market Bubble #3
AnsemFaZe BanksTJRTristan ThompsonMizkif
- Hyperliquid got a major institutional alignment: Coinbase bought Native Markets, the native stablecoin issuer, replacing USDH with Circle's USDC. Ansem said the roughly $5B stablecoin treasury should earn about 3.5% annually, with 90% of that revenue going directly to HYPE—an estimated $150M new revenue line. He paired it with the CLARITY Act advancing to the Senate; HYPE moved from roughly +4% at 10 a.m. to +13–15% on the day. The caveat: last quarter's revenue was flat, while stock perps had grown to roughly 30–40% of total platform volume.
- The episode's organizing thesis is Ansem's line that “attention is essentially the new EBITDA”: attention and social shifts often precede revenue. Examples included SanDisk's roughly 30x move, Chris Camillo's narrative trading and claimed roughly 70% annual returns for 18 years, and Trump as “the leading KOL of stocks”—including the government's 10% Intel purchase at about $20 and Trump's April 8 “great time to buy stocks” post followed hours later by a tariff pause.
- The title trade was Take-Two into GTA 6, with Ansem calling the retest around $210 a good entry and roughly $200 an invalidation. Banks argued from a roughly $40B valuation that GTA 6 could create more millionaires than prior games combined, possibly be 5–10x Roblox's scale, and justify attaching his brand to it “on some Michael Saylor strategy,” while admitting he might be delusional.
- Ansem was relatively bearish on Bitcoin and ETH versus other risk assets, called an ETH short a possible hedge, and expected Zcash and HYPE to reach new all-time highs over the next few months. He gave Bitcoin a roughly $79K key level and $75K invalidation, and said Nvidia and Google are now better risk-on barometers. His analogy: “I think ETH is Yahoo”; Hyperliquid is Amazon, aiming to become “the AWS infrastructure for all of finance.”
- Ansem's Zcash case was “Swiss banking in your pocket”: privacy and an alternative to Bitcoin amid quantum concerns and institutionalization. He cited Google’s concern about quantum risk around 2030, Bitcoin’s lack of privacy, and Zcash’s roughly $7B market cap versus Bitcoin’s rise from $200 in 2016 to $80K. He called Zcash the second-best store of value behind Bitcoin; Tristan said he had averaged in around $75.
- TJR's Polymarket idea was to buy equal shares of the top eight World Cup teams, aiming to buy roughly a dollar of eventual payout for 80 cents. He said he was personally hammering it; Banks' Claude check returned roughly 80% combined odds. The Serena Williams betting anecdote supplied the caveat that supposedly guaranteed outcomes can still lose.
- TJR disclosed averaging roughly $1.5M into Bitcoin from $100K through the $90Ks, then exiting for a six-figure loss into stables. He said watches—two RM 67-02s and a white ceramic AP—made back most of that loss. Cerebras supplied the opposite lesson: a pre-IPO market traded on Hyperliquid from May 1, reached about $280 while the round was priced at $185, and the stock opened around $350.
- The labor-market view was that white-collar software work is more exposed while electricians and plumbers may benefit from a “blue-collar bull run.” Ansem predicted AI would make investing broadly important as work changes. Other themes were nuclear and rare-earth exposure, religion as a possible source of purpose in a K-shaped economy, and marriage by 30 falling from 81% of men in 1975 to 16.5%; Banks speculated that AI matchmaking could eventually improve dating.
1. The show's operating thesis: make money, command attention, get AI-literate
- Banks' cold open frames the stakes in his register: politics is smoked, dating is “absolutely fried,” the incel rate is at all-time highs, and AI “is coming for your jobs.” His prescription is three-fold—make as much money as possible, “command as much attention as possible or at minimum understand attention,” and build AI literacy.
- The hedged optimism worth keeping: long-term, AI “makes everything free and cures cancer and solves world hunger.” The short term “could get dark”—including the specific casualty sketch that a paralegal in the last semester of law school with $400,000 in debt and no wealthy parents is “smoked, pal.”
2. Coinbase buys Hyperliquid's stablecoin issuer—and the CLARITY Act advances
- Ansem's breakdown of the day's news: Coinbase acquired Native Markets, the native stablecoin issuer on Hyperliquid, replacing USDH with Circle's USDC. The roughly $5B stablecoin treasury should earn about 3.5% annually, with 90% of that revenue going directly to HYPE—an estimated $150M new revenue line and “great alignment” with a strongly regulated U.S. crypto company, despite the two being seen as competitors in spot and perpetual trading.
- Banks flagged the skeptic take—revenue up 25%, chart up only 4%—and Ansem's answer was timing, not thesis: “the market was slow to respond.” By showtime, HYPE was up roughly 13–15% on the day.
- The CLARITY Act was pushed to the Senate. Ansem said it addresses whether tokens are securities, how banks can use stablecoins, and how founders can launch projects. He argued that if it passes, projects will have more clarity about directing revenue to tokens and operating in the U.S.
3. Cerebras: the IPO retail could trade before it existed
- The victory lap from the previous episode: Cerebras—a highly hyped inference-technology IPO—was discussed at roughly $115, then $130, then $185 per share, where it raised $5.5B. It was available as a pre-IPO perpetual market on Hyperliquid, through Bullpen, from May 1 and ranged roughly from $200 to $300.
- Ansem's point is structural, not just a win: retail traders could gain exposure before the Nasdaq listing. The pre-IPO market was around $280 when the eventual $185 round was announced, then the stock was announced to list around $350 and opened there. Banks thanked Ansem for putting it on the audience's radar.
4. “Attention is the new EBITDA”
- Ansem's core framework, delivered off a SanDisk chart up roughly 30x: these moves are not purely about revenue and market position. They are also attention plus momentum, with retail investors following the trade. When attention is combined with strong fundamentals, companies can go parabolic.
- The causal arrow is that attention precedes revenue: when ChatGPT launched in 2022, the revenue impact was not yet visible, but attention was shifting toward daily AI use. Ansem said it would have been difficult then to predict $700B of AI capex and buildout in 2026, but possible to identify where attention was moving. His thesis: find where attention is going next and trade that momentum.
5. Trump is the market's top KOL—and some traders profited by trusting the strategy
- Neither host knew the U.S. government could buy part of a company. Ansem said the government bought 10% of Intel for roughly $11B when the stock was around $20; he described it as now trading around $120. Banks compared it to Trump buying a memecoin and called Trump “the leading KOL of stocks.” His later copy-trading comparison to Ansem's trading was left as a loose 2021–23 reference in the conversation.
- Ansem said Trump announced aggressive tariffs—100% on China and 50% on other countries—and estimated that the stock market fell roughly 30% over a few months. On April 8, Trump posted that it was a “great time to buy stocks,” then paused the tariffs hours later. Ansem called it “God mode,” or copy-trading the U.S. economy.
- Ansem's tradeable lesson was that people who believed the tariffs were negotiation tactics and trusted Trump's intentions made money by trading around that view, while people who expected the policy to fail sold assets.
6. The Intel thesis: buying the fab before the fab works
- TSMC controls roughly 70% of chip manufacturing, according to Ansem, making it a core AI bottleneck. Intel is building a U.S. fab, with government support, and is working with companies including Tesla and Apple. Ansem also mentioned advanced networking work that he said was apparently more efficient than TSMC's current approach.
- The risk framing matters: “It's a big swing for sure... the thesis hasn't played out yet.” The fab is not yet up and running. Ansem's attention point is that the work existed before, but the profitable attention trade began when the market started focusing on Intel's future role.
7. Chris Camillo: equities are rigged for retail
- The clip from Threadguy's interview supplied the episode's intellectual anchor. Camillo described roughly 70% annual returns for 18 years and turning $20K into $80M. He argued that his competition in equities is weak, even though institutional traders have massive technical resources.
- His signature inversion was that retail investors are not necessarily disadvantaged: “Dude, it's rigged for us... If you're just normal and connected culturally to the world and can do whatever the hell you want, this market is rigged for you, not against you.”
- Ansem translated Camillo's “social arb” approach: monitor TikTok and social media to see what people are spending time on before quarterly earnings reflect it. Banks said Camillo sounded like someone who had spent his life in crypto and called him the GOAT.
8. The Take-Two setup: levels, entry, and a maximalist GTA 6 bet
- Ansem's technical call: prior highs around $210, which he identified as a December 2020 level, a ranging period, a break to new highs, and a retest. He called the area a good entry and placed invalidation around $200.
- Banks' fundamental conviction, at a valuation he described as roughly $40B: “This game is going to make more millionaires than every other video game before it combined.” He argued that GTA 6's earning potential was not fully priced in and said it could be at least 2–3 times, and perhaps 5–10 times, larger than Roblox in players and business activity. He floated attaching his brand to the game “on some Michael Saylor strategy,” while admitting he might be delusional.
- Later, Mizkif said his chat bought Take-Two based on a rumor that a Best Buy preorder listing could appear around May 18. Banks read a reply asking whether he was paid to promote the stock and answered sarcastically: “Take-Two paying me big, big bucks.”
9. The GTA 6 shadow economy: mods, takeovers, and a bullish read on a dead timeline
- A played clip described a wealthy friend raising $300–400M for a hostile Take-Two takeover. The idea was shelved because the stock rose too much. The same clip described an ecosystem of content, mods, tools, scrapers, guides, and possible in-game item sales.
- The clip said NoPixel, a GTA 5 mod, became more popular than the original game on Twitch. It also suggested that Rockstar embraced NoPixel and may have acquired it or a piece of it, while explicitly acknowledging that the acquisition claim was uncertain.
- The segment's bullish speaker interpreted a viral chart complaining about Rockstar's decade-long timeline differently from most viewers: the delay showed that Rockstar was putting all its eggs into GTA 6 and had spent years and billions building it.
- Banks described GTA as an open-world, second-life escape and said Rockstar's trailers and content had historically broken records. He speculated, with explicit uncertainty, that a GTA trailer may be among YouTube's most-viewed videos.
10. Nuclear via Solstice: the sole domestic conversion supplier
- Ansem's under-the-radar pick, credited to Citrini's research, was SOLS, Solstice Advanced Materials, spun off from Honeywell. He described the nuclear fuel chain as mining, conversion of uranium ore into UF6 gas, enrichment, and fuel fabrication.
- Solstice, according to Ansem, is the sole domestic U.S. supplier of the conversion step. His premise was that the U.S. does not currently have enough energy to power all the data centers being planned, making nuclear an under-discussed AI trade.
- He said Solstice had touched roughly $40 after the spinoff, reached about $86, and had recently broken out while retesting its prior high. He viewed the setup as technically and fundamentally attractive.
11. The lower-effort AI bet: DCA commodities
- Banks asked whether someone working 50 hours a week and unable to research individual companies could dollar-cost average into copper, lithium, and uranium. Ansem said that was possible, while stressing that each commodity has a different thesis: copper for chip wiring, lithium for EV batteries and electronics, and uranium for nuclear energy.
- He called commodities a lower-effort way to diversify, similar to adding real estate. His portfolio sketch was cash or savings, lower-risk indices such as the S&P 500 and QQQ, hard-to-fail large technology companies, then smaller-cap stocks and crypto as higher-risk sleeves. Commodities were the slowest layer.
12. Bitcoin's levels—and why Nvidia is the new risk barometer
- Ansem described Bitcoin's roughly $126K all-time high, a breakdown through the $100K level, a capitulation candle to $60K, and a $60K–$80K range since February. He said the roughly $79K area was important and that around $75K would be his invalidation for a renewed downtrend.
- His more important reframe was that crypto traders should use Nvidia and Google as risk-on barometers because stocks were in a “raging bull market.” He acknowledged being wrong on Nvidia: he expected a breakdown around April, and that point was the bottom.
- The side-by-side explained crypto's frustration: Bitcoin's 2021 high was about $69K, while Nvidia's late-2021 high was around $40 and it later reached roughly $235 and a $5–5.5T valuation. Banks said this explained why crypto participants were angry.
13. “ETH is Yahoo. Hyperliquid is Amazon.”
- Banks described firing off group-chat insults—“as cool as Axe body spray” and “as cool as, ‘Can I speak to your manager?’”—before adding, “Kid's about as cool as Ethereum.” He then realized he held a seven-figure CryptoPunk position while viewing ETH as possibly the least-cool asset on Earth.
- The hosts joked that ETH had been around $2,300 five years earlier, imagining someone waking from a five-year coma to find that it had barely moved.
- Ansem gave the more careful version: ETH was important and revolutionary for smart contracts, DeFi, and putting billions of dollars on-chain, but frontier technology is vulnerable to disruption. He compared ETH to Yahoo, with competition from Solana, Hyperliquid, and TradFi.
- The Hyperliquid comparison was tied to founder Jeff's stated ambition for the platform to become “the AWS infrastructure for all of finance.” Ansem's position was that ETH could be a good hedge short for a while, not an unconditional short call.
14. Venice, uncensored models, and decentralized compute
- Ansem said the VVV token had moved from roughly 11 to 20 before retracing. Venice AI, founded by Eric Vorhees in the transcript, was described as a private chatbot layer using open-source and frontier models. Ansem cited roughly 2M users and about 50K daily active users.
- The privacy distinction was that Venice keeps user information private. The censorship discussion came from Ansem's own anecdote: he asked Claude which of his employees was most likely to be gay, and Claude refused. He said an uncensored model from Dolphin AI would answer instead.
- Ansem's serious point was that users do not control the rules imposed by centralized model providers. Uncensored models represent one crypto-oriented answer to centralized model governance.
- He also discussed decentralized compute for the GPU shortage. Akash was described as probably the largest such protocol, while Dolphin AI was said to be pooling idle GPUs for inference and possibly working with Alibaba's Qwen model. Ansem stressed that the problem was not solved yet.
15. Zcash: “Swiss banking in your pocket”
- Ansem's case, discussed alongside a same-day Wall Street Journal article, was that Bitcoin is not resistant to the quantum risk he associated with a possible 2030 time frame, is not private, and has become heavily institutionalized as a U.S.-associated asset. He presented Zcash as an alternative on those dimensions rather than making a separately established technical claim about Zcash's quantum resistance.
- The privacy mechanic was concrete: someone receiving $100 from a Bitcoin address holding $1B could potentially see the larger balance, while a Zcash recipient would not know the amount held in the core address. Banks summarized the pitch as “Swiss banking in your pocket.”
- Ansem called Zcash the second-best store of value behind Bitcoin and placed it around a $7B market cap. He said it had been accumulating since 2016 and had never returned to its 2017 high around $800, while Bitcoin went from roughly $200 in 2016 to $80K.
- Banks said Maine, Flood, and others were less bullish than Ansem but still put Zcash in a generally favorable bucket with HYPE and some Bitcoin. Tristan later said he had averaged into ZEC around $75.
16. TJR's origin story: a Bitcoin license plate to a Puerto Rico tax base
- A senior on TJR's high-school football team gave him the Bitcoin pitch and appeared in an i8 with butterfly doors and a BITCOIN license plate. “Once I saw that I was like, okay, I'm freaking sold.” TJR then searched YouTube for “day trading,” traded the pound against the yen and gold, made most of his money in the 2020 Solana run, dropped out during college, and moved into equities and futures. He now trades the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, primarily ES and Nasdaq futures.
- His psychological point was that trading became easier after he had a large cash cushion. When he no longer needed trading to pay rent or buy food, he became less emotionally attached to each risk.
- TJR said Act 60 had been extended to 2055 from 2035, with 4% federal income tax, 0% capital gains, and a 183-day requirement. He argued that someone earning the same amount in the mainland U.S. could not operate at the same level.
- The accidental business benefit was boredom: after moving to Puerto Rico, he had few peers his age around him, so he began making TikToks and YouTube videos. That activity became his influencer career.
17. TJR on attention as currency—and where AI does and does not fit
- TJR said attention was “the best currency nowadays.” He streams trading on Kick in the morning, then continues with IRL content, 20–30 TikToks, or a YouTube video because he believes everyone needs a social presence.
- His AI boundary was “do what you're good at.” He sees his irreplaceable strengths as being in front of a camera and in front of a chart. He uses AI for short-form clip production and for ads, SMS, and email related to his clothing brand, but said an AI version of him is still visibly artificial.
- Banks described a more expansive workflow: recording meetings with lawyers, finance people, and the Market Bubble team through Gemini, feeding them to Claude, and asking AI to learn his businesses and investments and identify blind spots.
- Ansem described Bullpen's use of Polymarket's on-chain data, whale information, copy-trading controls, and Claude Code or terminal skills.
18. The World Cup Polymarket strategy: buying a dollar for 80 cents
- TJR relayed a friend's idea: buy equal shares in each of the top eight World Cup teams. If one wins, the payout would be $1 per winning share, while the basket supposedly costs about 80 cents because the top eight represent roughly 80% of the market. He described risking $30K to make $6K and said he was personally taking the trade.
- Banks checked Claude without additional context. Claude returned roughly 20% for the field and 80% combined for the top eight. The discussion therefore focused on whether a non-favorite really wins often enough to invalidate the apparent edge.
- Banks supplied a cautionary betting story about a friend who placed a supposedly guaranteed Serena Williams tennis wager, using the $1,000-to-win-$50 archetype, and lost. The amount was approximate and the total loss was described as closer to $20K.
19. Prediction markets are inefficient—and Bullpen is monetizing that
- Ansem argued that thin, new prediction markets contain inefficiencies retail traders can exploit through niche knowledge, slow-moving prices, and bots that follow successful traders or react to other markets before Polymarket does.
- Bullpen's whale page showed a trader with a 55% win rate and more than $800K in P&L, with configurable copy-trading parameters including maximum position size, maximum trader size, and slippage.
- The show also promoted a future competition costing $25K to enter, paying $100K to the winner, and running for four weeks. A separate live competition with Trade Paragon uses HIP-3 markets including altcoin dominance, Bitcoin dominance, and indices, with a $25K prize and a planned H100 compute-price market.
- TJR's product criticism was that Hyperliquid perps, at least on his phone, required him to adjust leverage and calculate risk manually, which was too slow for his trading style. Ansem said desktop was much better than mobile and offered to set him up.
20. The Puerto Rico pitch versus the built life
- TJR described Puerto Rico as an excellent place to live, invited the hosts to Dorado Beach, pointed to a private school in his neighborhood, and discussed buying real estate and businesses there. The transcript also included Banks and Ansem saying TJR was buying or considering a Ferris wheel, though TJR's broader point was his active investment in local businesses and property.
- TJR said he did not really imagine leaving Puerto Rico as his primary residence, though he would prefer having to spend only four months there. He acknowledged that a future wife or partner could change the decision.
- Banks' counterpoint was his attachment to Los Angeles: Beverly Hills walks, weather, people, employees, and the life he built there. He contrasted that with the original FaZe house in Plainview, Long Island, where the group stayed inside, played games, and made videos all day—a chapter he cherishes because he was not leaving anything behind.
- Ansem defended New York as a city that repeatedly feels unmatched after returning from travel.
21. TJR's stock roundup: MP, rare earths, and space
- TJR said Trump's proposed cutoff of Chinese rare-earth connections on January 1, 2027, could become a buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news trade and might be priced in before that date.
- Ansem said the MP thesis was more than a rumor because the U.S. government had already bought what he estimated was 5% of MP. He said the stock moved from roughly $15–18 to nearly $100 on the announcement, then consolidated around prior highs at approximately a $10B market cap.
- On Rocket Lab, Ansem said he bought around $67 and sold in the $60-something range, then watched it rise to roughly $120. He regretted not re-entering after deciding the 10x move had probably topped.
- TJR expected a roughly $1.8T SpaceX IPO to resemble a Pudgy Penguins launch: an initial spike, a fall, and a gradual recovery. Ansem said he would be surprised if a $2T launch did not consolidate, because space projects would not have an immediate impact. He thought SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs together could create a market local top, but advised waiting rather than automatically shorting.
- Ansem said Elon-related companies trade heavily on attention and momentum. Tesla benefited from the EV narrative before the revenue fully arrived, and the Twitter-to-X conversion strengthened Elon's positioning.
22. TJR's Bitcoin loss—and the watch portfolio that helped recover it
- TJR disclosed putting close to $1.5M into Bitcoin while it fell from $100K into the $90Ks, then exiting for a six-figure loss into stables. He said he preferred taking the loss and allocating the capital elsewhere.
- His recovery vehicle was watches: two RM 67-02s and a white ceramic AP. He said the AP had gained roughly $50K–70K and that the watches had made back most of his Bitcoin loss. His logic was that $300K on his wrist was more enjoyable than $300K sitting unused in a bank account, even though he intended to sell the watches when he returned to markets.
- Banks defended the AP-Swatch pocket-watch launch against the argument that it cheapened AP. He compared it with Off-White/Nike, Louis Vuitton/Supreme, and Porsche/LEGO: placing an accessible version in front of a young person can create a lifelong desire for the original. TJR agreed that a $1,500 AP on a high-schooler's backpack could function as a funnel.
- Ansem called the launch genius-level marketing and one of the year's biggest attention events. The hosts also debated watches, jewelry, and gender-coded luxury preferences.
- Banks said roughly 20% of his net worth was in Chrome Hearts and that he was up roughly 500%, calling it his best investment of the previous two years.
23. Advice to the 18-year-old with nothing: AI plus obsession
- Ansem's playbook was to become familiar with AI every day. Businesses run by older people who are not at the forefront of the technology will need younger people to optimize workflows. He compared this opportunity with being among the first people to use the internet.
- He predicted that investing and trading would become increasingly important as AI reshapes work, because people may need ownership of successful companies to leapfrog wealth tiers. Banks added the Whop thesis: package expertise in trading, cooking, gardening, or another field and sell it directly through a platform.
- Banks' extension was to focus on something genuinely interesting or obsessive if starting with no skills. He argued that obsession improves retention and learning, and recommended pairing it with intensive AI education rather than automatically going to college.
- His warning was that social media, clips, and internet culture can become a “glue trap” designed to keep people doom-scrolling. “Be a searcher. Don't be a scroller.”
- He closed the beat by saying that although being young, poor, and without wealthy parents is frightening, there has never been a better time to start with a clean slate. Opting out of AI, he said, will eventually resemble opting out of electricity or the internet.
24. Mizkif's conspiracy: AI as a new species—and the blue-collar bull run
- Mizkif offered the theory that creating AI created a new, more intelligent species. He speculated that once AI has limbs and can run businesses, it may realize how useless humans are.
- Mizkif named the YouTube channel The AI Species, which discusses AGI, AI 2027, and possible AI-takeover scenarios. Ansem agreed that AI will likely surpass humans in many areas but kept his long-term optimism: he expects AI eventually to make everything free, cure cancer, and extend life dramatically. He said the frightening question is what happens when AI has its own interests, biases, and goals.
- Banks' squirrel analogy was that humans do not hate squirrels, but if humans want to build a city in a forest, squirrels may die as a side effect. Humans do not necessarily stop because of that.
- Ansem's labor-market corollary was that electricians, plumbers, and other blue-collar workers could become more important and harder to replace than software-based white-collar workers. Banks said accountants and lawyers may go first because “Claude is smarter than you.” The chat called it a “blue-collar bull run.”
25. Tristan Thompson: SPVs into Anthropic and SpaceX, with BlackRock as a counterexample
- Tristan's investing frame was that the NBA is leverage and a launchpad into rooms, but cannot be the entirety of a career. He said investing should focus on where the world is going, not where it is now.
- His Anthropic and sub-$300B SpaceX exposure came from spending time in San Francisco while playing the Warriors in four consecutive Finals and attending dinners with technology investors. He used SPVs to invest early and bring friends into larger allocations.
- Banks said he and Ansem had considered putting their entire lives into Anthropic in December but had fumbled the opportunity.
- Tristan's BlackRock story was that he asked the firm managing his portfolio about buying Bitcoin and was told it was too volatile. Later, he saw Larry Fink and BlackRock buying it and concluded that the managers wanted to benefit from his capital while discouraging him from doing the same.
- His crypto entry began with a friend turning $1K into $50K on a meme coin, then calling him sleepless from Los Angeles. Tristan followed the crypto-Twitter rabbit hole through Ansem's WIF posts and other influencers and decided he needed to understand crypto if he was going to be the financial authority in his locker room.
- He cited Magic Johnson and Shaquille O'Neal as athlete-investor models and said he wanted to become a younger athlete who invests in consumer technology.
26. NIL is pro money now—and the financial-literacy push behind it
- Tristan said he was working with Capitol Hill and Congressman Gus Bilirakis on NIL issues. He described college athletes receiving professional-level money, including a Klutch Sports athlete who had $11M wired to a debit account.
- His proposal was for universities to let athletes choose a financial advisor or manager as part of eligibility, just as they require academic standards. He argued that many bachelor's degrees do not lead to jobs in the corresponding field, while protecting capital is immediately important.
- He wanted former players such as himself, Evan Turner, and John Wall to teach financial management instead of leaving young athletes only with institutional money managers.
- His Antoine Walker example was that one Chicago investment left Walker personally liable because the entity was not structured under an LLC. The investor lost $28M, and Walker was sued as a slumlord.
- Ansem argued that the lack of financial education for suddenly wealthy athletes may be partly intentional or predatory because luxury and designer brands target that demographic's spending power. Tristan described the resulting pressure as maintaining a persona and “swag over safety.” Banks offered the show as a possible distribution channel.
27. NBA picks, Wemby-as-alien, and AI sports medicine
- Tristan picked Oklahoma City, with San Antonio as his fallback, and said the champion would come from the West. The conversation noted Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at roughly 98% on Polymarket to win MVP.
- Tristan called Wembanyama possibly the best big man in the league since prime Shaq and emphasized his defensive impact, shot blocking, size, and ball-handling. He also named LeBron and Kyrie as favorite teammates to watch and Kevin Love as a particularly funny teammate.
- His AI investment interest is health data and sports medicine. He cited Tyrese Haliburton, Jayson Tatum, and Damian Lillard suffering Achilles injuries and argued for AI-assisted player-load analysis, injury prevention, better coaching, and methods to keep marquee players on the court.
- Mizkif, during the later overlap, supplied the line: “Perception of reality is realer than reality itself. Never forget that.”
28. The aliens-and-conspiracies detour—with Banks' ant argument
- A speaker on the panel said the aliens-in-the-ocean theory was his or her top conspiracy and expressed roughly 80% confidence because so much of the ocean remains unexplored. Another speaker called the claim that Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide a fact rather than a conspiracy.
- A different speaker argued that the moon landing was photoshopped; Tristan rejected that position. Because the transcript labels several voices only as generic speakers, the moon-landing and ocean-conspiracy attributions are not certain.
- Banks' rebuttal was that faking the moon landing would require an enormous number of people to maintain the secret. He compared it with the Clinton scandal, where only a small number of people needed to know, and said that when he lacks expertise he relies on people such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku.
- Banks' anti-UFO logic was that an alien civilization advanced enough to reach Earth could probably destroy humanity without being noticed, or would simply reveal itself. Hiding would be like humans hiding from ants. Another speaker countered that aliens might wait until humanity reached some threshold before revealing themselves.
29. Mizkif's chat portfolio: CoreWeave pain, gains, and unresolved numbers
- Mizkif said he had given his Kick chat $300K to invest while acting as their “financial adviser,” adding that he was not actually a financial adviser. He first suggested the portfolio had reached $46K, then later said he had added another $100K that day and described the current figure as $47K. Banks characterized the result as roughly $7K up.
- The transcript does not make fully clear whether the $46K–$47K figure referred to profit, a partial figure, or the portfolio total. The cleanly supported point is that Mizkif added $100K that day and said the portfolio had gained roughly $7K in the subsequent exchange.
- CoreWeave was the major loss. TJR said the group bought emotionally around earnings and lost roughly $3K on that position after another 10% decline. MP was also down, as were a coffee trade and HIMS after earnings.
- Banks said it was unfair to judge MP as a short-term trade because the hosts had presented it as a longer-term position. Mizkif said he had not used leverage because he wanted the chat to learn fundamentals first.
- The group discussed a Caleb Hammer-style one-on-one finance show for Mizkif and proposed a future competition in which Mizkif could put up $25K and let chat make trades. That was discussed as a proposal rather than a confirmed official entry.
30. The NVDL earnings bet—and LWLG, bought for dubious reasons
- Mizkif said the group put $52K into NVDL, the 2x Nvidia ETF, ahead of earnings. His thesis included Jensen Huang's visit to China, his statement that the meeting was among the most important in human history, a claim that 25% of Nvidia's work would be through China, 18 of the last 20 earnings being positive, an average earnings move of about 8%, and eight consecutive earnings beats. These were presented as Mizkif's claims.
- Ansem agreed conditionally that Nvidia selling higher-tier GPUs into China instead of restricted lower-tier products could be significant, and suggested that a trailing stop on a leveraged perpetual could offer more downside control than an ETF.
- Mizkif also said the group bought $20K of Lightwave Logic, or LWLG, after a bad earnings report sent it down 18%. The stated reasons were that he called the company, found the receptionist's voice attractive, made a joke about the headquarters looking like a barren TJ Maxx, and received a buy suggestion from a Discord user called “the Jewish guy,” who said his synagogue favored it.
- Mizkif acknowledged that chat wanted to invest $10K but he put in $20K because he was attracted to the receptionist. The trade was presented as a deliberately absurd example of retail decision-making.
31. How pre-IPO perps price—and Anthropic's warning
- Mizkif asked about a statement from Anthropic saying that unofficial secondary transfers of Anthropic shares were not permitted. Ansem clarified that a Hyperliquid perpetual tracking an implied Anthropic price is not facilitating the sale or purchase of actual Anthropic shares; it is a derivative market.
- Without an oracle tied to a public stock price, the perpetual is priced by the order book. Longs and shorts take opposite sides, and supply and demand settle on a price influenced by participants' knowledge of secondary transactions and other information.
- Cerebras was the example: its pre-IPO market traded around $280 while the official round was priced at $185, then jumped from roughly $280 to $380 when the market learned it would open around $350. It was later around $330. Ansem called Hyperliquid the venue where price discovery occurred for the year's biggest IPO.
- A SpaceX market was visible on Virtuals, but Ansem said its liquidity was only around $5M. He speculated that similar markets could appear for SpaceX and other private companies after the Cerebras example, without claiming that the larger venues had already committed to listing them.
32. Religion is trending up—and the K-shaped economy may explain why
- The group discussed a chart comparing religious and nonreligious identification. Ansem's thesis was that AI may strip work of purpose, increasing demand for religion and faith as sources of meaning and truth. He also connected religion with a possible counterweight to declining marriage and family formation.
- Mizkif said the current generation resisted religion because it had been forced on them, while parents now may be teaching it less. He suggested people want connection and tribalism that modern life has weakened.
- Banks asked why religion and markets might rise together when people usually expect religion to rise during downturns. Ansem answered with a K-shaped economy: people at the top are benefiting from the AI boom while people at the bottom are not, and the middle class is being eroded or split.
- Mizkif turned the thesis into a joke about leveraged wine companies and wood stocks because churches need wine and pews.
33. Marriage by 30 collapsed from 81% to 16.5%—and Banks' kids-first framework
- The chart showed that in 1975, 91% of women and 81% of men were married by age 30, while the male figure later fell to 16.5%. Banks said people once owned homes, married, and had multiple children by 30, while marriage now appeared to be phased out.
- A clip discussed someone in his 40s resisting settling down, noting that “your best friend is your phone,” dating and birth rates are down, divorce is up, and people may return to hobbies and adventure instead.
- Banks recognized the phone point in his own life: he and the woman he is seeing can lie beside each other scrolling. That kind of “phone time,” combined with social media's apparently endless options, creates dissatisfaction and disconnection.
- Banks' framework was to identify whether a partner would be a good mother before prioritizing marriage. He criticized the conventional order of lust, partnership, marriage, and children because both partners can change dramatically over five years. His preferred approach was to discuss family-building early and, if romance later failed, preserve a cooperative family relationship.
- Ansem called it Banks' most cogent take of the night.
34. AI as a possible solution to dating—and the show's forward plan
- Banks argued against the common view that AI will only worsen dating. He said AI could become “the final solution to dating” by combining Tinder with Claude and using emails, spending, careers, travel, food, religion, and preferences to build a fuller profile than a person can consciously create.
- His hypothetical system might identify a highly compatible person nearby and recommend her with a confidence level. He acknowledged the darker version: recreating an ex through AI after a breakup. Ansem said the concept resembled the Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ.”
- Banks and Ansem connected the episode's broader AI fears to the fact that Black Mirror's once-dystopian scenarios now seem technologically plausible.
- The wrap described Eric Vorhees and Trader Mayne as guests who had not appeared and might return. The Market Bubble trading competition was presented as starting the following week, with a $25K entry, a $100K prize, and a four-week run. The longer-term vision was to invest in people, ideas, and markets live, blending crypto, Twitch, and entertainment.
- Banks returned to the show's core message: money, attention, AI literacy, health, and “invest in yourself.”
Full transcript
Welcome back to Market Bubble. It's a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday at 1 p.m. PST live on twitch.tv/fazebanks. And I'm here joined with my tall, beautiful co-host, Ansem.
Yo yo, what's good, fellas? How we doing?
And he is live on Twitter at the exact same time every Thursday. He's the tech finance big brain side of this. I'm responsible for media, content, and attention—that piece.
We open up Twitter and everything is smoked. Politics is smoked. They're lying to you. Dating is absolutely fried. The incel rate is at an all-time high, marriage rates are collapsing, and AI is coming for your jobs. It's [expletive] your wives, it's killing your kids. You're [expletive].
You're going to need 3 things. First, make as much money as possible. Second, command as much attention as possible, or at minimum understand attention and the way it works. We're going to get very deep on that one today. Third, of course, is AI literacy. Understand this technology, because it's going to take everything. It's taking over everything.
We're long-term optimistic on AI. We think this technology inevitably makes everything free, cures cancer, and solves world hunger. The short term could get dark, though. If you're a [expletive] paralegal in your last semester of law school with $400,000 in debt and your parents aren't rich, you're [expletive] smoked, pal.
I feel like we started this show as soon as stuff started popping off in crypto. There are some really cool things happening today. A few things that I'm going to pull up and talk about, but the first one is a big announcement from Coinbase.
Coinbase bought the native stablecoin issuer on Hyperliquid, which is Native Markets. Previously, it was USDH, and now it's going to be Circle's stablecoin, USDC. The entire treasury TVL on Hyperliquid, which is around $5 billion, is now going to be supported by Coinbase and Circle.
This added an entirely new revenue line to Hyperliquid and also creates great alignment with Coinbase, which is one of the strongest U.S. companies in crypto. They have all the regulatory advantages. It's a great stamp of approval for Hyperliquid. I think people see them as competitors because they offer a lot of the same trading products, like spot and perpetual trading, but this alignment is really crucial.
On that $5 billion, they're going to be making around 3.5% annually from the stablecoin. With the way they activated this on Hyperliquid, 90% of that revenue is going to go directly to HYPE. In the same way that HYPE makes revenue from all the perpetual fees paid by traders, it's also going to make revenue from all the stablecoins on the platform, which is huge. This added an estimated $150 million.
I don't know 1 person who doesn't like Hyperliquid.
Yeah, all the competitors. That's about it.
That's a good sign, right?
Yeah. Even some of their competitors are starting to align their interests and forces with them. I saw a tweet right before the show saying something along the lines of, “Revenue is up 25%, but the chart only moved up 4%,” with question marks and concerns around that. What are your thoughts on that?
The market was slow to respond. When crypto is at the forefront of people's minds in a bull market, we respond a lot quicker to news. Generally, they increased revenue by around 25%, and at the time the token was only up 4%. I think that was after the announcement.
It's up 13%.
It's up now. It moved throughout the day. It was up around 4% at 10:00 a.m., and now it's up around 13% to 15% on the day. It's done really well.
We also have the CLARITY Act, which happened today. They essentially pushed it through to the Senate to evaluate it. If people don't know, what is the CLARITY Act?
The CLARITY Act is one of the most important bills in Congress right now. It's trying to get a lot done: getting clarity on whether tokens are securities, getting clarity on how banks will be able to use stablecoins, and getting clarity on how founders will be able to move in crypto and move through the process of launching projects.
A lot of the reason for the disconnect between equity and tokens is that we're not sure whether these tokens are securities. There are also issues with directing revenue back to the token because they don't want it to appear to be a security.
If this CLARITY Act gets through Congress, it's going to be huge for crypto projects and protocols in general, because we'll have a lot more clarity. That's why it's called the CLARITY Act: it will clarify how crypto should operate in the U.S.
It's a good day for crypto, baby.
For sure. Huge day.
And then something else happened too, right?
I think it was Hyperliquid with Coinbase. Oh, the Cerebras IPO happened today. We talked about that last show, right?
Yeah, we did. We talked about it a little bit. We were right.
We were super right.
Guys, we were right. We were super right.
Ansem and Banks were super right about Cerebras.
Yeah.
Cerebras is here on Bullpen, and you can trade it. This IPO was one of the most hyped IPOs this year. It's a technology company focused on providing faster inference for all these models and labs.
At first, it was priced at around $115 a share. Then it was priced at around $130 a share. Then it was priced at $185 a share, which is what it closed at. They raised $5.5 billion at $185 a share, and it was trading on Hyperliquid this entire time.
Since May 1, when they knew this IPO was coming soon, you could have traded it as a retail investor on Hyperliquid. There was nowhere else you could have traded it before it launched. It ranged from around $200 to $300 over the past 2 weeks, and then today, right before it launched on Nasdaq, they announced it was going to list at around $350 a share.
Everybody who bought on Hyperliquid through Bullpen over the past 2 weeks is up money. There's no other way for retail investors to get exposure to this asset before it listed.
Thank you for putting it on everybody's radar, Z.
I got you.
You're doing God's work, helping us get rich and stay rich. It's [expletive] amazing.
That's awesome. A lot of stuff is happening today.
I talked a little bit in the intro about attention and how we're going to highlight it. We have some deep topics and deep thoughts on attention this episode. Do you want to give us some thoughts on that?
If you look at stocks over the past year, SanDisk is a good representation of how crazy things have been. SanDisk is one of the most popular stocks of the past year. It's up around 30 times.
Why is this stock up so much? It's not purely because of the revenue they're making or their position in the market. It's also because of how much attention they've gained and how much momentum they're trading off, with retail investors following in their footsteps.
What we're really looking at here is that attention is essentially the new EBITDA for a lot of these companies, especially in a world where everybody's on an LLM, everybody's on social media, and everybody's sharing their ideas around trades. Trades that aren't popular become popular extremely fast. When that's also bootstrapped by companies with strong fundamental value, that's why you see these things go parabolic and stuff just go crazy.
If you really think about it, what attention—
That's a [expletive] bar, by the way. Attention is the new—
Yeah. Thank you, brother. That's crazy. Thank you.
If you really think about it, it's facts. If you really think about it—
Before you even see the metrics change in revenue and how much companies are making, attention is the precursor to all of that happening.
So, when ChatGPT first dropped in 2022, there were a lot of companies that benefited from ChatGPT and people using all these LLMs, people using these models, but you didn't see it in the revenues yet. It would have been much harder to predict in 2022 that there was going to be $700 billion spent in 2026 on AI capex and the buildout, but you knew that attention was shifting toward people using AI, people using these models, and people using them on a day-to-day basis.
That's the core thesis: try to find where attention is going next, how you can profit and benefit from that, and trade that momentum.
So that obviously raises the question: What stocks are benefiting from attention right now? What should we be following? What should we be looking at? Where should we be parking our money if it's in line with that?
Yeah, I think the core—one of the biggest beneficiaries of this attention trade has been Intel. Intel is one of the stocks that's up a lot this year. But a lot of what drove attention to Intel originally was the U.S. government and Trump buying 10% of Intel for, I think, around $11 billion.
That was back when the price was around $20, and now the stock is trading at $120.
I didn't even know they could do that. I didn't even know the U.S. could buy a company. Did you?
I didn't. I didn't either. I honestly did not either. It's kind of crazy.
How often does that happen, that the U.S. just comes in and buys a company—10% of a company—for billions of dollars?
Yeah, it can't be that frequent. I think it's because they're seeing how important being the lead runner in tech and AI is as a country. That's why they're—
They're trading like me, like memecoins. It's insane. So this is very similar to Ansem buying WIF, right? It's like Trump buying Intel. Trump is the leading KOL of stocks, essentially.
He is. He literally is. And he's very direct in what he's doing. If you look at earlier in 2025, when he was talking about all the tariffs and the shit that was going on, people were very surprised at how aggressive he was with the tariffs.
In January, he was like, “I'm putting 100% tariffs on China. I'm putting 50% tariffs on this country. I'm putting 50% tariffs on this country.” The stock market tanked extremely hard, like 30%, I think, in a few months.
Then he comes out on April 8 and puts out this tweet. He's like, “Great time to buy stocks,” publicly. He says it—not before, not attached to anything else. A few hours later, after he posts this tweet where he's like, “It's a great time to buy stocks,” he rolls back and pauses all the tariffs on all these countries, literally within hours after he said that.
He's playing God. He's playing God.
He's literally playing God mode, copy-trading the entire U.S. economy. It's fucking crazy. But, yeah, he's really intentional with how he does these conversations. I think he's actually been pretty smart about how he's negotiating with a lot of these countries.
A lot of people were super scared because, obviously, if you put 100% tariffs on some countries, it's going to impact prices a fucking ton. People were like, “Well, we're terrified because that could hurt the economy.” There were some people who were like, “No, this is just a negotiation tactic. We don't actually think he's going to do this.”
1. NIL
It's interesting: people who were aligned with Trump, believed that he had the best intentions at heart, and knew what he was doing in the negotiation actually made a lot of money just trading off of trusting him. There were a lot of people who sold a lot of shit just because they didn't think he was going to do well.
Again, copy-trading Trump in 2026 is like copy-trading Ansem in—
2020—what? 2022, 2023?
2023, 2021. It's just that simple. So what else? What else can—because it's not as simple as just buying fucking AI, because nobody can do that, right? These are all private companies and already worth fucking gazillions and gazillions of dollars.
Talk about Intel. You've been talking about Intel since we started the show, too. You want to recap the TL;DR thesis and just remind people why?
I have.
2. Intel & the AI chip bottleneck
Intel is a U.S. tech company. One of the core bottlenecks for AI right now is a company called TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. They control around 70% of all chip manufacturing, and for manufacturing these chips, that's a huge, huge, huge advantage that they have because everybody has to go through them to make the chips, which are necessary for training all these models and doing inference on all these models when people are using these chatbots.
What Intel is doing is building its own fab here in the U.S. Trump is obviously greatly in support of that because we don't want to be relying on countries or companies that aren't in the U.S.
But also, the way Intel is positioning itself in the market, they've invested a ton in building out this fab and trying to position themselves to benefit from all this investment that's happening in AI. They're working closely with a lot of other big companies, like Tesla and Apple. They're also doing a lot of advanced work on how networking works between these chips.
You can look more into how they're doing this networking, but apparently they are working on a system that's a lot more efficient than what TSMC currently does. It's a big swing for sure. It's definitely a risk-taking move.
The people who bought around when Trump bought definitely took a big risk. The thesis hasn't played out yet. This is what I'm saying about how attention and narrative affect these markets, because that fab is not up and running. People aren't using it for all these things yet. It's a future prediction on how well they're going to do, and you only saw that happen as attention shifted toward Intel.
They've done a lot of work over the years, obviously working on that tech and building it out, but the attention trade is when that really shifted and when you could have made a lot of money off of it.
One of my favorite people to listen to—we talked about him a little bit, I think, in episode 1 and even when we were doing the dry runs—is Chris Camillo. Did you watch the interview with him and TJR?
I haven't gotten a chance to watch it, but—
That guy was really good. I think it was Thread's best interview. Honestly, he crushed it. It was a really good interview. I saw a ton of positive feedback around it. We have a clip here. Maybe let's just watch this to give them some context.
Yeah, it's a good spot.
Let's watch this.
So I go to investing events and conferences, and there's technical traders, there's fundamental traders. Dude, I'm just like an alien. I don't relate to anyone. I don't give a crap about anything that anybody else is doing in the investing world. It could be as foreign to me as anything you could imagine.
I've had no friends in my world. I had no one to relate to. Then all you guys step in and you're doing this crypto stuff, and I'm like, “Okay.” It sucked for me because I was like, “Dude, what the hell are they doing?” But then, on the flip side, I'm like, “Dude, if all of these guys got involved with equity trading, my edge would go down meaningfully.”
These kids are young, they're sharp, they're using algos. Everything that I'm doing, they're doing, but they are relentless. They're doing it the way I did it a long time ago, where I just didn't sleep. I'm like, “I don't know that I need millions to tens of millions of those kids competing with me as attention-arb traders, social-arb traders, whatever you want to call them, in the equity market,” because my competition in the equity market is freaking nothing. Nothing.
People are like, “How did you generate 70% returns for 18 years?” Well, I mean, the new audit's not out yet. It will be soon. I'm waiting on Jack to give it to me. I think it's roughly 70% for 18 years straight.
3. GTA 6 thesis
And you don't understand how weak the competition is in equity markets. You really don't understand. This dude turned $20,000 into $80 million. You really, really don't understand how much opportunity is in this space that I've been working in.
Yeah, they're smart technically. Yes, they have access to tens of billions of dollars and infinite resources technically, but none of that matters. They don't know what the hell they're doing.
I just started talking about this recently, about these crypto traders coming into my space, because I knew it was inevitable. It actually is starting, and I'm more happy about it than mad, because truthfully, my life obsession is to fully democratize the investing landscape—to have every human on Earth enter the investor class, have them be successful, and have them truly understand and believe that they could be great at this.
No one believes me, dude. Every person is like, “Oh, well, the game is rigged. It's rigged against us.” I'm like, “Dude, it's rigged for us, dude. If you're a retail investor, just a normal human that doesn't have to report to a conventional office on Wall Street every day with a bunch of suits and protect your job and go by conventional research methodologies—”
If you're just normal and connected culturally to the world and can do whatever the hell you want, this market is rigged for you, not against you. Nobody ever believes me when I say that.
Well, Chris, we believe you.
We believe, bro. It's literally how I trade—literally how everybody in crypto learned how to trade.
Bro, he sounds like a guy who's lived in crypto his entire life. By the way, that does not sound like a guy who's up 70% over the years. Bro, you know how much 70% a year is for 18 years straight? You know how that compounds?
That's obviously the average, right? Some years he fucking absolutely crushed; some years probably ran flat. But, yeah, 70% for 18 years is crazy. He's the GOAT.
That's why I brought up the Amazon thing in that first episode—or it was a dry run or whatever. This is, I guess, the question: Is trading against the trend and with narrative trading like this? This guy, Chris Camillo, has basically labeled himself as a narrative trader, right? Is that the new meta? Is that the move?
Definitely. I mean, it's always been how money flows through markets. What he talks about is a lot like the social-arb thing he talks about. He's essentially saying that you're going to see these changes in social and in attention before you see the changes in the company's revenue.
He talks about a lot of scenarios where he spends time on TikTok and social media, looking at what people are spending their time on and what they're interested in before it hits the books, before people report the quarterly earnings. People report the quarterly earnings after all of this stuff happens. If a company has a blowout quarter, if you're tracking attention closely and paying attention to what people are looking at and what they're shifting their trends toward, you catch it before the stuff comes out.
So I think it's honestly a very accurate way of predicting the future and how you should be investing. I think it relates to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, because you've been talking a lot about GTA. GTA is that attention lever for the company Take-Two, which is behind GTA. If you think about how many people are going to be talking about that game when it comes out and all of these different things, I think that's a 1-on-1 setup that makes sense—the attention trade.
This is something I keep saying, brother. I doubt that, with the way that stock is trading right now, people are taking into account how much potential GTA 6 has to make money. If people are just trading against EBITDA and just how much money it's making year to year over the last 10 years, maybe it makes sense. But as somebody who sees the writing on the wall and knows where this game is going, do you want to share this?
Yeah, actually. It's up today.
It's up today. Like, gapped up.
Yeah, I think this is honestly a good entry for Take-Two. We talked about it a couple weeks ago when it was just reclaiming this area, 210. Its prior highs were around 210 in December 2020. It hasn't traded that well; it's been ranging here. It just started trending again, broke all-time highs, and then came back down and retested.
I think right here is honestly a good spot to enter because I think it's about to go into price discovery. You can pretty easily have a good stop-out invalidation around this level, which is the same level here, around 200. I think it is a good spot, to be honest.
Brother, this game is going to make more millionaires than every other video game before it combined. I'm willing to take that bet and take that swing. Again, what's it trading at right now? $40 billion, something like that?
Somewhere around there, yeah.
I think somebody jumps into this ecosystem and builds on this platform and establishes themselves or their company as a billion-dollar asset or value in GTA. Again, it doesn't seem appropriately priced to me, considering how much attention is going to be on this game. I think it's going to fucking take over.
There's a ton of shit around this. There's a clip that you actually linked me to.
Yeah, I want to pull it up.
Yeah, this is a good one.
4. Hostile takeover story
“I have this friend who was one of the first guys to convince me that I needed to put a huge chunk of my net worth into crypto early on. He was basically saying, ‘Why aren't you 80% in crypto?’ And I was like, ‘80% is insane.’ And he's like, ‘You're younger than me?’”
“He's like, ‘This is obvious. What are you talking about? This is what it's going to be.’”
He's been early on a few different calls with me in my life, to the point where, when he says something that I find outlandish, I have learned through the trauma of not fully backing his prior things that I should really pay attention.
He came to my house about a year ago and he was like, “Yeah, I'm thinking about putting together a hostile takeover of Take-Two Interactive.” I'm like, “Take-Two Interactive? What is that? Do they make video games?” He's like, “Yeah, they make NBA 2K and Grand Theft Auto,” and it crushed.
And I was like, “What is a hostile takeover? We won't even do that.” He's like, “This will be my first.”
By the way, the hostile takeover has been shelved now. The stock went up too much. I don't know if you know how a hostile takeover works, but you have to acquire about 5% of the company silently and then announce your bid. You really want it when it's like Snapchat right now, when the stock is just going down, down, down, and you can rally support that a change needs to be made.
He was raising $300–$400 million to do this, but the stock went up. Once the stock popped, there wasn't going to be enough enthusiasm, the price went up, and the return would go down on the activity.
So there's a whole economy around this. There are people who do content around this. There are people who create mods, tools, data scrapers, and guides, and then there are people who sell things in the game. We don't know exactly how the game's going to work, but it might work like some of these other video games now, where you can buy and sell in-game items.
Yeah, like skins, guns, outfits, whatever—different aspects of the game. There are going to be a lot of people who get wealthy off this. In the last wave, when GTA 5 came out, these guys made this thing called No Pixel. They created their own mod version of the game, and they ended up selling it back to the company after it got really mega-popular. It got more popular than the real game on Twitch.
I just think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for—
And where typically you would expect Rockstar to reject that and send a cease-and-desist—you've seen this historically in gaming. Anytime somebody tries to break the game, it's like, “No, you can't do that. Don't fuck with our shit. This is our IP. We own it.”
Rather than do that, Rockstar, I guess—what he just said, I don't know if this is true or not—acquired them or a piece of them, but also just embraced it. There was a really big tweet around that where Rockstar was just putting its arm around NoPixel, which xQc, of course, owns a piece of, along with some other popular GTA streamers.
I don't know. He's speaking to this. There's something that I saw that I also thought was interesting on this subject.
Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Sorry. Give me one second. Yeah, here it is. This tweet, this graph, and you see the caption, too. It's a negative caption: “I look at this Rockstar timeline monthly and get pissed.”
It popped off. It got 2 million views and 15,000 likes. Obviously, people relate to this. Most people would look at this and be upset, like, “Fuck Rockstar. What have you been doing for the last 10 years?”
Me, I'm bullish looking at this, because all this tells me is everything we've been talking about: They are going all in. They are putting all of their eggs in this basket, GTA 6. Again, they have spent fucking 10 years building the game, and they've quite literally spent billions and millions of dollars building it.
So again, everything is in line with what he's saying. I just don't think that the market is pricing any of this in. Obviously, it's a traditional market. It's not just GTA. The ticker is GTA, right? It's like a fucking game, whatever. I don't know. I just—
5. World Cup arbitrage
Again, Roblox is another one that's kind of comparable to it, and it's sitting around the same price. I can't imagine GTA not being at least 2 or 3, probably closer to 5 to 10 times bigger than Roblox in terms of how many people are playing it and how much business is being done on the game. That's what I would look at. Again, I don't know.
Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting stuff.
It's super interesting. I never was a big GTA guy, to be honest. I play a lot of the other shit, but yeah, it's super popular with people.
I can see how it’s going to attract a lot of eyes and a lot of attention. It’s just an open-world, Second Life-type game. You’re a broke-ass bum at home; you don’t have a life, you don’t have many friends, and you can hop on GTA, drive a fucking Ferrari, get your dick sucked, and fucking kill somebody who’s talking shit to you. It’s all in good fun in GTA.
In GTA.
Yeah. And historically, by the way, GTA has been the biggest fucking game for as long as I can remember. All the trailers, all the content, and all the output from Rockstar have always been record-breaking. MrBeast has talked about this. I think the most-viewed video on YouTube was a GTA trailer. Is that true? Am I getting that right? Somebody maybe tell me.
Yeah. Is that true?
I think it is. I think it’s one of the most-viewed, if not the most-viewed, video. GTA—I’m obviously high on GTA. I talked a little bit in my pre-show about leveraging FaZe’s entire brand and kind of going all in on this, on some Michael Saylor strategy, where I just completely attach my brand and my business to this game and the success of this game. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. Maybe I’m just fucking delusional, but this is just one of those things.
I’ll hand it back to you. I want to get back into the conversation about stocks and where your head’s at as far as where the markets are at. Maybe pull up—
Some charts.
Yeah. Talk about where you think things are at. But yeah, Intel, Take-Two.
Yeah, some other stuff I’ve been looking at. I think with the AI trade, a lot of it has been focused on the tech companies, the chips, and memory. Those have been the 2 most popular ideas in the trade over the past few years or so. Obviously, there’s been a ton of spending. These tech companies are adding a lot to their bottom-line revenue by spending smartly and investing in AI.
But what people haven’t talked about as much for the U.S. specifically is that we actually have a lack of the amount of energy necessary to power all of these data centers. We literally don’t have enough energy right now to power the amount of data centers we’re trying to build to train all these models and do inference on all these models. An interesting area that I’ve been looking at is nuclear—nuclear energy as an investment and as an alternative to natural gas.
There’s a company called Solstice Advanced Materials. The ticker is SOLS. I got this from Citrini. Solstice spun off from the bigger company Honeywell, and they are a key part of the system for nuclear energy. You have mining, where you get the uranium ore from the ground. Then you have conversion, which is converting that ore into uranium hexafluoride, which is UF6 gas. You have enrichment, and then you have fuel fabrication.
Solstice is the sole domestic supplier of conversion in the U.S., so this is necessary for any nuclear fuel chain. They’re in a really, really, really good position here. If you believe that the U.S. is going to invest more in nuclear energy and in that area, it makes a ton of sense for this company to do well and for its revenue to inflect up over the next few years.
6. Commodities
It’s also a pretty good chart. It’s interesting because it spun off from a bigger company, so it doesn’t have that much price history. I’ll pull it up. Solstice is at around $86 right now. When it spun off, it touched $40, and then it’s up roughly 2 times over the past few months. It just recently broke out; the stock is retesting its prior all-time high. I think it’s in a good spot technically, and I also think it’s in a good spot fundamentally. It’s one of the things I’ve been looking at and trading.
So you mentioned uranium. I saw a tweet from you about copper, lithium, and uranium. I saw copper broke all-time highs, so I’m assuming the other 2 are in line with that.
Yeah.
Materials is maybe a dumb question—a dumb fucking FaZe Banks question—but is it ever a move or a play for the average guy who works 50 hours a week and doesn’t understand 90% of what you’re saying, or can’t make an informed decision to make a sizable investment in something like Solstice? Is the play for that guy ever just to DCA into copper, lithium, and uranium? Is that kind of the AI bet?
Yeah, you could say that. I think those 3 have 3 different theses for why they would do well. Copper is important because it’s needed for the wiring between all these chips. Lithium is important because it’s needed for EV batteries and a ton of other tech and electronic things. Uranium, as we know, is key for nuclear.
I think commodities as a portion of your portfolio does make sense. Like you said, it’s a lot harder to research the thousands of stocks that exist, find the best one, and invest in that. Commodities are a lower-effort way to diversify your portfolio.
In the same line as adding real estate to your portfolio?
Exactly.
Real estate’s up, what, 3% or 4% year over year. Is that low?
I couldn’t even tell.
Yeah. I don’t know shit about real estate either. I know fuck all about realty.
Most people typically have a cash balance or savings balance. They have low-risk plays, which would be the indices—the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, the Qs, QQQ—or the large tech companies, which are really hard to fail, like Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon.
Then they have their higher-risk plays, which are smaller-market-cap stocks or crypto, where you can see higher returns. You risk a smaller amount of your capital because they’re a lot more volatile and have a higher chance of underperforming. Commodities are the slowest.
Well, crypto, Ansem.
It’s everybody’s favorite subject and favorite segment.
What about crypto? How are we feeling about it?
Honestly, I still don’t like the majors as much. I still don’t like Bitcoin and ETH as much. I do think Bitcoin is in a great spot technically. I think it’s holding this key level, which is $79,000. I’ll just map it out on the chart here. This is—
I have in my notes here that you’re shorting ETH. I’m going to take a piss real quick. Go off. Go off, King. Talk about ETH. Talk about majors. I’ll be right back.
Got you. Pull up my—
7. Copy-trading Trump
Can I share just my screen and me solo?
Which is this one?
Okay, cool. All right, bet. Yeah, yeah. I’m not as bullish on the majors as I am comparatively to the other risk-on plays in tech and in the stock market. But I do think I’m super bullish on Zcash and super bullish on HYPE. I think both of those are going to trade at all-time highs over the next few months.
I think Bitcoin and ETH are going to be a bit slower to get back to all-time highs, but I do think they’re going to follow. If you hold, I would be looking for around $75,000. That would probably be my invalidation for where I think Bitcoin would start downtrending again.
The all-time high was around $126,000. It downtrended, broke this key support level around $100,000, consolidated again, and then broke down again. This is the first time in a few months that it’s actually starting to break out from this range that it’s traded in for a while. This is clearer if you go to the weekly, but this weekly candle was the capitulation candle. It hit $60,000. It hasn’t touched $60,000 since it ticked this, but it’s been stuck in this range between $60,000 and $80,000 since February.
8. Word of the day
This past month is when it finally broke out above $80,000 again. This range high and this demand level are what I would say is important for Bitcoin to hold to continue trending higher and continue going up. Stocks are in a fucking raging bull market. If you look at the S&P, the Nasdaq, or the Qs, it’s literally just straight up through all-time highs.
My best way to describe this is that if you were looking at Bitcoin as your core risk-on trade—if you’re a crypto trader, only trade crypto, don’t really trade stocks, and Bitcoin is your core asset to look at—I think you can do the same thing right now with Nvidia and Google. Those should be your barometer for how you look at risk-on markets in general.
Like if you look at Nvidia, I actually was super wrong on this. I thought it was going to break down around April, and that literally was the bottom tick. But this chart is pretty evidently the key indicator of what people are looking at for risk. If you look at Nvidia compared to Bitcoin, it's pretty fucked up. I'm going to do a—
It's insane. I mean, you look at Nvidia next to anything, and it's pretty fucked up.
It's fucked up.
It's pretty fucked up.
It is. It's literally $5 trillion.
$5 trillion.
Yeah, $5.5 trillion.
My God, man. Let me touch 0.001.
I know, right?
What the fuck?
Yeah. So, I mean, this is the best side-by-side comparison I can do to show how AI has just outperformed crypto so much. Bitcoin's all-time high in 2021 was $69K. Nvidia's all-time high in late 2021 was literally $40, and now it's at $235. So it's like 7x from that high, and Bitcoin is basically—
No wonder everybody in crypto is fucking mad and crying all the time. It's like, can you blame them? It's fucking insane.
It's fucked. I am super bullish on crypto as a technology. I do think there's a lot of startups that are going to emerge out of crypto over the next few years and do really well. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation there.
But for majors like Bitcoin and ETH, in general, I think they're going to underperform. They're not going to outperform in the same way that they did over the past decade. Like Bitcoin—
So you heard it, folks. You heard it from Ansem straight: We're not touching Bitcoin, and we're shorting Ethereum. Ethereum's fucking trash, right?
I think Ethereum is a good hedge short for a while.
I told you that I had this little anecdote. How do you say that word?
Antidote.
I'm fucked.
What did you say?
No, not antidote. An antidote is like a cure for something. An anecdote is an experience from your own life or an example from your own life. Am I fucking stupid?
The answer is yes, by the way. Anecdote. That's what you mean.
Anecdote. Yeah, yeah. Anecdote. I'm a 50-year-old fucking manchild.
Bro, what are you talking about?
Anecdote. Anecdote. I have an anecdote from my personal life. This was kind of my final aha moment. I'm not going to expose the group chat, but I was in a chat with a few girls. We went and got lunch that day, and they went to the Lakers game and ran into one of my friends. One of the girls in the group chat said, “Hey, I saw your friend so-and-so,” and he said, “Tell Banks you're with the cooler friend now.”
I was talking shit back and forth, trying to articulate how this guy is not cool. I said, “Kid's about as cool as a fart in church.” I was just firing these off. I said, “Kid's about as cool as Axe body spray. Kid's about as cool as buying bottle service at Poppy”—which we love Poppy, but bottle service in 2026 is fucking not cool. “Kid's about as cool as, ‘Hey, can I speak to your manager?’” And then I said, “Kid's about as cool as Ethereum.” That just came out of me. That flowed straight out of me.
I'm typing and firing these off off the top. That's so fucked up. I've realized I don't own any Ethereum, but I have a seven-figure CryptoPunk position open, basically. I'm like, “Fuck, man.” It was kind of my aha moment that Ethereum might be the least cool asset on Earth.
Yeah, bro. I mean, you see all the memes, too, of the haircut—the Ethereum haircut versus the Solana haircut versus the Bitcoin haircut. You know what I mean? It's like it's always just Vitalik, also. The only thing keeping that motherfucker's aura up is his fucking hammer. This guy has a piece. That's it.
Thank God, by the way. If Vitalik had a little dick, ETH would be at fucking $200 right now.
So fucked up.
It's insane.
It's fucking insane. I saw a tweet about how, if you went into a coma 5 years ago, Ethereum would be at fucking $2,300.
Same price. It's the same price. You accidentally had $100,000 in ETH 5 years ago and went into a coma. The first thing you're going to ask when you wake up 5 years later is, “Holy fuck, how much is that worth?”
It's like, bro, it literally hasn't moved at all.
I mean, it's tough because I think what happened in 2020 and 2021 was important. I don't hate on ETH too hard. I think ETH was super important for the development of crypto and smart contracts, and for L1s in general moving money on-chain. They were revolutionary in having the first platform where billions of dollars literally came on-chain through DeFi and a lot of other protocols.
9. Hyperliquid = AWS of finance
But what you have to look at in tech, in a field as innovative as crypto and on the forefront, is that it's really easy to get disrupted. Even in the early 2000s, there were a lot of tech startups that did really well, and there were a lot of tech startups that failed completely.
10. SpaceX IPO
In that bubble in 2000, 2001, and 2002, there were teams that—if you look at Yahoo and Google, for example—were probably neck and neck in how popular they were as search engines. If you look at Google now versus Yahoo, Google is literally the number 2 company by market cap globally, and Yahoo is obviously—
Yahoo is a little fucking chocolate milk drink that you can get at 7-Eleven.
Exactly. So I think ETH is Yahoo. That's my take. I think ETH is going to be the equivalent of Yahoo. They just have a lot of competition from Solana, from Hyperliquid, from a lot of other chains, and from a lot of TradFi entities coming into crypto.
What's Hyperliquid in this metaphor?
Amazon.
Yeah—
Amazon. It is. There's actually—
His face. You saw his face. I said something smart, chat. Fuck.
No, there's actually an interview with Jeff, the founder of Hyperliquid. He wants Hyperliquid to be the AWS infrastructure for all of finance. That's literally what they're trying to do.
Banks said I can walk away happy from Episode 3. It's a great—
Cool. Yeah. So enough about ETH. ETH is trash. Hype's amazing.
Yeah. What else do I have here? VVV, which you called. You gave the audience a fucking great call on VVV. It's up a lot. I think it's up—
Up from 11 to—
Yeah, it's up from 11 to 20 since you fucking called it. It's up almost 100%. Great call again, Ansem. Thank Ansem in the chat—the fucking 5 people that had the balls to go make that trade. Congratulations. He magically and mysteriously 2x'd your money. Thank you, Z. You want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I'll talk about V.
That's who we're supposed to talk to today: fucking Eric Voorhees, guys. Go tweet at him and tell him to come next week.
We were so excited.
Yeah, we were. We had a ton of good questions lined up for him.
We'll get him on. He couldn't do today, but we're going to get him on later. Venice is one of the interesting areas in crypto right now. There's been a lot of discussion around what projects at the intersection of crypto and AI are going to do well.
Eric Vorhees is the founder of Venice AI, and that platform is one of the most popular crypto AI platforms right now. Venice is an AI platform that's essentially the same way that you use ChatGPT or Claude as a chatbot to go back and forth. Venice is that, but they have a ton of different models on the back end that they use. Some are open-source models, and some are the most popular state-of-the-art models.
11. Venice AI
The differentiator between Venice and these other platforms is that they keep all of your information private. A lot of people have concerns around how much access these labs have to all the information that you're giving them. Venice's main attraction is that privacy, and they have around 2 million users. I think they're doing around 50K daily active users right now.
The token went from 11 to 20 last week, and now it's back down again. But I think it's going to be one of those areas that could continue to do well in crypto.
Another area specific to crypto and AI that's trying to solve a big problem is how little compute we have available for inference. The reason you see all these big tech companies and labs investing so much right now is because these models take a ton of investment to run and do well, but there's literally not enough GPUs to power all of them.
There are a lot of decentralized compute platforms in crypto that are trying to address this issue. I think probably the biggest one is Akash. I don't know if it's pronounced Akash or Akos, but that's one of the protocols working on that.
There’s another protocol connected to Venice, which is like Dolphin AI. They’re also working on a similar solution, trying to solve that problem by utilizing idle GPUs that people have, pulling them together, and then allowing these models to use that pool of GPUs for inference. Their main partner that they’re going to work with, I think, is the Qwen open-source model. I want to say it’s from Alibaba.
There’s a ton of opportunity there for coordination of computing in crypto. It hasn’t really been solved yet, but it’s definitely an interesting area to look at. It’s one of the most popular.
We were going to talk about Dolphin AI with Eric, right?
Yeah. Venice. Dolphin is the provider of the uncensored model that Venice uses. If you’re using the Venice platform, you can use Claude, you can use some of the ChatGPT models, but you can also use an uncensored model, which is the one that Dolphin AI provides.
The censorship piece is interesting because a lot of ChatGPT, Claude, and all the big labs have very strict rules on what you can ask and what you can say to the models. If you were to say anything that’s kind of off-kilter that may offend them—
They’re censored very heavily.
Very heavily. If you were to say anything that’s kind of off-kilter that may offend them—
What do you think is the worst religion, or who do you think is my [__] gayest friend?
That’s actually another anecdote from my own life. I asked Claude this question. I said, “Out of all the people that work for me, who do you think is most likely to be gay?” We were talking amongst ourselves with the team, just joking about who we thought it would say.
It wouldn’t answer. It was like, “I can’t say that for legal reasons, X, Y, and Z.”
But it was funny. You ask Dolphin AI, and it’s going to tell you.
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because we’re not in control of what that censorship is or what they’re telling the models not to say. So, who has the power and who gets the influence to do that?
I think one of crypto’s core tenets, which is really important to crypto, is not having to rely on some centralized entity for what you can and cannot do. They want the technology to be free and open to everyone. Uncensored models are one way that crypto is looking at doing that.
There’s one final thing I want to talk about in crypto before TJR comes on. He’s going to fill the spot, and he’s going to be on in 7 minutes with us, which is cool. I know he’s a friend of yours, a friend of mine, and a friend of Polymarket, so that’ll be fun.
But Zcash—what’s Zcash doing? How’s that moving? I asked you last night, “Do you think this is a good spot?” I asked Maine, and I asked Flood, and I asked a couple of other people, too. Those guys aren’t as bullish as you, but they put it in the same bucket as, like, HYPE, HYPE, and a bit of Bitcoin. This is an okay asset to buy. It’s probably only going up, but there are probably better opportunities elsewhere. How are you feeling? Are you still as bullish on Zcash?
This got covered in The Wall Street Journal. Yeah—
It did today. Actually, I’ll pull up that article.
I have it here. I’ll do it.
I have it.
Yeah.
Right here: “It’s a more secretive version of Bitcoin, and it’s on a tear.”
Yeah.
“Zcash reminds some of Bitcoin’s early days, but some see its privacy features as a red flag.” I might need to cop the [__] subscription for that.
Yeah, I like Zcash a lot. I think the reason Zcash has gotten so much attention right now is that there are a few issues with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is facing issues with quantum right now. It’s not a quantum-resistant platform, and Google thinks we’re going to have issues with quantum a lot sooner than we previously thought, somewhere around 2030.
Second, Bitcoin is not private, obviously, as you know. Third, Bitcoin is also very institutionalized. It looks like a U.S. asset right now. A lot of the early attraction to Bitcoin was that it wasn’t connected to anyone, any country, or any government. Zcash is kind of the alternative for a lot of these things.
12. ZCash
Billionaires who have a [__] ton of money—if you look at how much money is stored offshore, in Swiss banking accounts, or in other areas, the reason for that is that you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re in a country and the government is trying to seize your wealth or do anything with it. You want to diversify your assets. There’s no billionaire who has all of their wealth in one country or one area.
Zcash is essentially Swiss banking for those people in your pocket. Instead of having to look at different bank accounts and different areas to store your wealth, Zcash allows you to do that, have access to it at any point in time, and take it with you anywhere. It’s private, too.
Say you have a [__] ton of Bitcoin. If you have $1 billion in Bitcoin and you spend $100 of it directly with somebody, anybody you sent that $100 to now knows you have $1 billion in Bitcoin. If you have $1 billion in Zcash and you send somebody $100 of that Zcash for whatever payment or whatever reason, they don’t know how much you have in your core, actual address. That’s the core reason I think Zcash differentiating itself from Bitcoin is important.
Private money on-chain. I mean, you said it best. That was a [__] bar, by the way. “Swiss banking in your pocket.” Whoa. Hit that one, Jack.
That was really good.
Crypto has two kinds of assets. There are assets that are stores of value, which is Bitcoin. Then there are assets that are businesses and tech assets, which is stuff like HYPE. Zcash is, in my opinion, the second-best store of value behind Bitcoin.
Right now, it trades at less than $10 billion. I think it trades at around a $7 billion market cap, so I think it has a lot of room to do well and a lot of room to grow. A lot of the OG people who were early to Bitcoin were also the people buying Zcash over the past 10 years. It’s been in accumulation since 2016.
It’s never really trended past its all-time high of $800, which it hit in 2017. It’s never really been in price discovery like a lot of other crypto assets. If you look at Bitcoin, it was at $200 in 2016, and now Bitcoin trades at $80,000. In 2016, Zcash was the same price that it is right now.
As you can see in the title screen, we’re going live with TJR in 2 minutes. I think it kind of perfectly segues into the question that I have for you, a broad question that I’m pretty sure is on people’s minds: Are we entering a crypto bull market?
Maybe think on that, sit on that, and maybe that’s how we can start the conversation with TJR, because I know TJR isn’t a really big crypto guy either. I know that he was buying a [__] ton of Bitcoin.
I think he did well with Solana. I actually followed his story. I’ve seen some of the stuff, like the videos he did about how he came up.
I’m the only person on planet Earth who lost money on Solana. I get it. We don’t need to keep bringing it up. I lost close to half a million dollars on Solana. It’s all good, though. We’re going to get it back in blood, baby. We’re going to get it back in blood. We love Solana. It’s not over. It’s not over until [__].
Yeah, I do love Solana. I really do. It’s my favorite asset in crypto. I shill it so many times, bro.
Yeah.
It’s insane.
Yeah.
I’m just going to follow you. Next time you think about buying it, whether you buy it or not, please think about me as well and let me know.
I got you, bro.
All right, TJR’s coming on. I’m going to give it to you, and I’m going to go take my 16th piss of the stream.
All right, bet.
Guys, can I get a water? What’s good, lads? How are we living? How are we doing?
How’s it going?
Let’s see if I can pull up chat. Everybody’s talking about [__] coins in the chat. Is there anything you guys haven’t had, are interested in me talking about, or want us to talk about? Want me to look at stocks, crypto, tech stuff—whatever it is—let us know so we can get ahead of it and pull it up on stream.
I know I get a lot of inbound questions about the show and what we should be talking about, but there’s always stuff that I miss, for sure. Somebody said, “SpaceX will be building future data centers in space. What are my thoughts on this?”
I don’t think it’s going to be a short-term thing that happens.
I do think Elon’s grand vision makes a ton of sense. Aligning all his companies—xAI, SpaceX, and all these different things—together is smart, but that’s a long-term situation. We’re not going to have data centers in space next year.
Yeah. Where you at? Yo, am I here?
What’s good, bro? You sound like you’re in an airplane.
Oh, sorry. Here, let me turn this down.
Yeah, just make sure it’s all the right audio.
No, you’re good.
It sounds better now. That sounds better now.
It’s good. Okay, cool.
Yeah, just make sure the sources are all good. Thank you for coming on last minute. You were going to come on as the second guest, but—
Eric Vorhees clearly doesn’t fuck with us, so you’re—
Damn, bro. What’d you guys do?
He hates us. I don’t know. Oh, no, he had an emergency. We’ll have him on next week or one of the following weeks. I was excited about—
No, no. You mentioned the name. I have no clue.
So, this show—what do you think about this show, first off?
I was pumped about it. I watched the full first one that you guys did. It was awesome.
I think that there are obviously a whole lot of stock and crypto shows, but I think you guys are bringing a fresh, youthful energy to it. We can mix entertainment with education and put it out to the masses. We saw what has happened with other finance podcasts that get very little viewership being acquired for millions of dollars, which is just insane. Imagine at what scale you would be able to bring this to if you guys can get a whole lot more viewership, which so far has been the case.
I think something that we’re touching on, too, which I feel like a lot of these more traditional finance and tech shows ignore, is an emphasis on attention. We kind of opened this show up with that and talked about it. Did you watch Threadguy at all?
Yeah. Did you watch his interview with Chris Camillo?
No, I haven’t yet. Are you familiar with Chris Camillo, though?
No. What? Who is he?
Big narrative trader. Bull posts Amazon. Brilliant guy. Super, super smart guy. I think he’s my favorite. He’s becoming my GOAT.
13. Puerto Rico tax glitch
Yeah, he trades on narratives and momentum. He flipped $20K into $80M just trading stocks and firing hard into single names that he thought were undervalued, then riding those trends and rotating really aggressively. It’s the same way we rotate aggressively in crypto. In 2021, it was Solana, Luna, AVAX—when one isn’t moving, another one is.
He behaves in traditional stocks and trades traditional stocks as if he were in crypto. He sounds like a guy who lives in crypto, but he doesn’t.
Stocks are the move now, in my opinion.
For sure. We were just talking about that. Is crypto entering a bull market? Ansem, what was your final conclusion on that?
I think yes, but I don’t think Bitcoin and ETH are going to outperform in the same way that the other leading assets are. I think Zcash and HYPE are both going to trend to all-time highs over the next few months. But if I were splitting my portfolio right now, it would probably be 70% stocks and 30% crypto. That’s how I would do the split.
I know, TJR, you traded crypto and you trade stocks. Tell us a little bit about your story with trading—how you started trading, how you got into content from trading, and your view on how that’s beneficial for people.
Yeah, for sure. I first learned about crypto when I was a freshman in high school. There was a senior on our football team. He was kind of the dude who could get anything on the black market and was always a weird guy. He was on our football team and essentially gave us the whole “Bitcoin’s going to change the world” pitch. He ended up getting a brand-new—I think at the time it was an i8 with butterfly doors—and a license plate that said Bitcoin. Once I saw that, I was like, “Okay, I’m freaking sold.” This dude was able to pretty much just say, “Fuck everything. I’m able to do this.” As a high schooler, I’d never seen anything like that.
From there, I pursued crypto pretty hard, and that’s really what led me to get into trading. I started out trading currencies. I was trading the pound against the yen for a bit, and I would trade gold as well.
What gave you the idea to do that?
I literally just looked up “day trading” on YouTube.
From there, I was doing that pretty much all throughout high school. The 2020 bull run is really where I made the majority of my money. It was just Solana. Everything was built on Solana. Once I had a fat stack of cash, trading became a lot easier. I’m sure a lot of you guys can relate to that: when you’re no longer trying to force trading to work because you need it to pay rent or put food on the table, it becomes a lot easier to trade. You’re not as worried about the risk, and you’re not nearly as emotional or emotionally connected to the money that you’re risking.
From there, I gradually switched over to trading equities and doing futures. Now I only trade the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. I’ve been doing that for a while now—only ES and Nasdaq for the past 2½ to 3 years.
So, not only are you trading against attention, with that at the forefront, but is it fair to say that attention is the most important piece of your entire business—as a brand and as a personality on the internet?
14. Air Force One flight
Oh, bro, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to mention the social media come-up. I started doing social media the first semester of my sophomore year of college. I ended up dropping out right after that because everything hit all-time highs. I obviously made a bag from crypto, and then I moved out here to Puerto Rico to avoid all taxes.
Smart.
That’s smart. Moving to Puerto Rico is really what kicked off my influencer career because I wasn’t really living in a college town anymore, and I wasn’t really constricted by other people’s opinions.
And let’s face it, what the fuck else is there to do in Puerto Rico, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, genuinely, I got out here and looked around, and the only friends I could make were 50 years old or older. I thought, “Okay, what are these guys doing? They’re working.” I only trade for an hour and a half to 2 hours in the morning, so I might as well make TikToks and YouTube videos on how to do this shit.
So, it changed your life in 2 ways. Obviously, one was more calculated and financially charged, but the second one—yeah, that’s interesting. We’ve actually never talked about that, but that’s cool.
15. Using Claude to trade
Yeah. Now I see attention as the best currency nowadays. Obviously, I do my trading in the morning, but I’m killing 2 birds with 1 stone. I’m streaming my trading on Kick in the morning, and then after that I continue the stream, going IRL, doing 20 or 30 TikToks during the day, or making a YouTube video. I need to be putting out as much content as possible because I see where the world’s going. You need to have a social presence.
We’ve got to pick your brain on short-form—TikTok and Instagram Reels. We’ve got to do that because, in my opinion, that’s why anybody knows who you are. That’s really how you and—like a virus—you infected everybody’s timelines and Reels.
Again, you’re packaging and presenting, like you said, content. We’re not the only people who are successful or who have made money trading, right? But the way we’re packaging it and delivering it, and the subjects that we’re pairing it with—this attention piece—that’s what this show ultimately is about. It’s about how AI is going to disrupt the fuck out of everything.
We talked last time we hung out—when was that? It was in L.A.
Yeah, I can’t remember when that was.
We went for a little coffee walk. It was fucking cute. I was super-pilled on the AI shit. As soon as I set up OpenClaw, I was like, “Bro, you’ve got to go home and set this shit up.” Where are you at with that right now? Where are you at with AI? How has it worked its way into your day-to-day? Are you—
Yeah, I just clawed the fuck out of everything. I try to use AI as much as possible, but I feel like if you have a software company, for example, obviously AI is going to be able to help you out immensely.
But for me, a lot of it is just trading, and trading AI isn't necessarily going to help me out too much, at least right now. Then content: I'm the only one who can be in front of the camera, so a lot of my business is just asking it for advice on little things. It's helped a bit on the clothing-brand side of things that my business partner and I run, to be able to do ads, SMS, and email. I feel like, at least where I'm at right now—
Do you think you could be doing more, or should be doing more, with it? Do you feel that, or do you—
To be honest? Yes. But something that all of the most successful people I've ever met in my life have told me is, “Do what you're good at.” What I've seen that I'm good at, and that I will never be replaced at, is being in front of a camera, and also being in front of a chart.
Right now, AI can't necessarily completely replace me. You can still tell that it's an AI version of me. So until that becomes the case, that's when I would want to be able to actually implement that. I have implemented it with short-form content and being able to mass-produce clips. That's a little gem that a lot of you guys probably aren't hip to.
Well, that's what we preach: use it for what it's worth. It's a tool, right? Be the human element. Be the best version of, like you said, whatever you're good at. Add emphasis. Really, we're saying the same thing in different ways.
I think you put all your eggs in the baskets that make sense. Like you said, for you it's being in front of a camera and being in front of charts. I don't know. It's safe to say—what percentage of this show does Claude produce, realistically? I'll share it right now.
We do a lot.
Look at this. There's like a—
We do topics with links and hooks and stuff, and Claude does this whole thing.
16. Bullpen × Polymarket
I record every single meeting that I'm in, whether it's with lawyers, finance people, or the Market Bubble team. I record it with Gemini and feed it to this thing. The way that I've been using it, I think it's interesting for us 3 because there's so much readily available information about us online.
We talked about this on our walk, but it's like, “Learn me and understand me in every single part of my business and everything that I'm involved in and invested in as much as you possibly can, and highlight blind spots or things that you think I could be doing better.” That's everything from your health and what you're doing to what you're eating every day. I don't know. That's kind of how I use it, really, for everything. I think it's super valuable to—
Give it as much information as possible about you, your business, and everything that you're doing, and just allow it to build this profile on you and understand you better than yourself. That's where we're headed, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. We have to use AI a lot at Bullpen. One of the key advantages of Polymarket—the fact that they have all of their data on-chain—allows us to do a lot with indexing that data, looking at the top traders, and looking at all the information that we get from that.
We have a lot that we're able to do with AI. The CLI, which is essentially the terminal, works with Claude Code. In Bullpen, if you ever wanted to build a skill to look at certain sports trends or certain predictions that people are looking at, you can do all that directly in your terminal with what we've built there.
Also, a lot of the data around whales—we have our page on predictions. This is our whales page. You see this guy has a 55% win rate and more than $800,000 in P&L. They've also built out the ability that, if you just wanted to copy-trade this dude, you could put how much you would copy-trade, the maximum size per position, the maximum size per trader, and the slippage on each trade.
If you wanted not to use any of these limits, you can do that too. A lot of the stuff that we've built is used by AI. AI is in our system to build a lot of these different things. I know, TJR, you're big on Polymarket. Is there anything you're looking at or trading right now, predictions-wise?
My boy just sent me this. I don't want to take any claim for this, but my boy sent me this this morning. I want to hear you guys' thoughts because I'm personally going to hammer it. I'll read it to you.
You sounded genuinely excited when I called you today. You said, “Yo, I have some—”
I am excited. I am excited.
Crazy World Cup alpha, bro. We're about to get into it. You're about to dump it all to me, and I said, “Save it for the show.”
Okay, for the show. This is the first time we're hearing about it.
Okay, this is maybe part of my degenerate side showing, but the World Cup is coming up. This is one of my friends who's overly loaded. Actually, he might be on X, but he's anonymous. Massive memecoin guy.
He said, essentially, you're able to buy a dollar for 80 cents right now on Polymarket via the World Cup. He said you pretty much buy the same amount of shares for each of the top 8 teams on the World Cup Polymarket. The theory is that by buying the top 8, you're buying around 80% of the market, because the odds that one of those teams doesn't win the World Cup is very slim.
Less than 20%, for sure. Surely.
Exactly. You're buying more than 80% of the total market.
This could be a banger.
That's what I'm saying.
Okay, so again, you're assuming that one of the leading 8 teams is going to win, which would cash out at a dollar. If you buy the same amount of shares across all of the top 8 teams, then if you were to risk $30,000, you would essentially be able to make $6,000.
No, it makes perfect sense.
The World Cup. So I'm personally hammering it.
I think I'm going to take this, bro, because the top 8 makes sense.
Bro, I don't know anything about soccer. I'm way more into football.
No, but what you're saying just logically makes perfect sense. These opportunities obviously exist in sports. You can slam Serena Williams to win her 15th consecutive tennis match.
Actually, I have a real—here's the word of the day again—anecdote. Real life. My friend back home, a degenerate gambler, slammed some Serena Williams tennis thing. That's where he was at: $1,000 to win $50. It was so guaranteed, and he actually ended up losing. So there obviously is still—wait, bro, he lost like 20 bands doing that.
$1,000 to win $50.
I'm making up this number. It was closer to probably $20,000 of money that he didn't have, to win probably a couple racks. In his mind, it was just like, “Let me farm this quick, easy $1,000.”
But no, the 20% discrepancy is crazy. That's probably the real odds of that if you ask Claude. I can do it right now.
I wonder. I'm going to ask Claude right now. I'm going to ask Claude.
Yeah, that is interesting. I think the thing with Polymarket and prediction markets is that they're so new, and because there's not a lot of volume on them in certain markets, there are a lot of inefficiencies that retail specifically can take advantage of.
It's kind of similar to what the Chris Camillo guy was talking about. If you're not a large entity that needs to trade billions of dollars, there are certain areas in the market where you can just be better than a fund. I think it's the same thing with prediction markets.
There are a lot of areas that you can trade where you might have an advantage, have more knowledge on that certain topic than somebody else, or see something that moves slower than something else. A lot of people have made bots specifically for tailing people who are doing well, or adapting to changes in other markets that Polymarket isn't the first to react to. It's definitely an area where you can make money.
That might be a little money glitch, brother. I might have to slam that as well.
What's the—I might have to slam that as well. 100 bands, win a quick 20.
That's what I'm saying. Risk 100 racks—
100.
Yeah, that's fire.
Oh, we might have lost him.
Yeah.
Sorry, sorry. My—
Isn't the World Cup in New York? It's here, right?
It's in the U.S., yeah.
It's in—I think some of the games are in—it's in New York, right?
Wait, wait, hold on now. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
There's one in Miami.
I know that.
It's saying 20%. It's the odds for the top—this is Claude. I didn't give it any other context. I just gave it, “What do you think the odds are for the top 8 favored teams?” Whatever. It says 20%. It says a combined 80%.
Polymarket's accurate, I guess. You're not really getting a ton of—I don't know. When's the last time somebody outside the top 8 won? Is that—
I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. Find that average.
20% is [__] crazy.
Yeah.
I wonder how much it is to go to some of the games. Those are probably going to be lit.
I'm definitely going to go. I don't even know [__]. I don't know [__] about soccer, but I know they turn up.
Yeah, soccer fans are die-hard.
They're die-hard.
17. Tristan Thompson joins
Yeah, I might pull up to some of that [__], too. When is it—in June, right? The first round is in June, like the middle of June or something, I think.
So, you're still in Puerto Rico now, right? How much do you go back and forth? Do you have to do 50% or whatever it is?
Yeah, you have to do 183 days out here. Honestly, man, I need to talk my [__]. Everybody on Twitter—I love seeing people on Twitter say, “Oh yeah, I could move to Puerto Rico, but I don't want to live in a hut.” Bro, Puerto Rico living is so great. It is.
You're never going to convince me.
It's so bad. Have you been here, bro? Come to Dorado Beach. Come to Dorado Beach.
I'm sure I could enjoy it. We honestly should pull up.
We should pull up. I'm down to come visit.
Puerto Ricans are sexy as [__], too. Puerto Rican girls are sexy as [__]. That is true.
I'm sure I could enjoy it with you. You obviously have a whole [__] home base. You're talking about buying [__] Ferris wheels and [__]. You're buying up real estate and businesses in Puerto Rico.
Okay, so for context, they just extended Act 60 to 2055. Originally, it was going to end in 2035. First of all, you have to understand that my income—if I'm making double what everybody else is making, if they're making the same amount as me, I'm making double the amount as them. Not only that, I'm able to make double from my investments because it's 4% federal income tax. So I'm still paying a tiny bit, but then 0% capital gains.
How do you expect anybody that's making the same amount of money in the States to be able to operate at the same level? It's just not possible. I also look at all of these billionaires that are living here. If they can justify living here, I sure as hell can justify living here.
I think it makes perfect sense for you. Honestly, I'm really [__] sold on it in regard to you and your life, just based on learning and discovering that that's really what pushed you into content as heavily as you're in it. Being bored is a good thing sometimes.
Right now, I've isolated myself the last year—not in a depressing, dark way, but I've decided to spend a lot more time on my own, with myself, and it's been great. It's been very productive. I live alone now, and being bored, having nothing to do, and being in your head in a good way—being in grind mode—is a good thing.
Wait, so what's your number for when you would leave? There has to be some number where you're like, “Okay, I don't need to be in Puerto Rico anymore.”
Because, like, are you going to plan on settling down there forever, or do you want to—
Bro, there's one of the best private schools in the country in my freaking neighborhood.
For real?
Yes, bro. If I have kids, I know exactly where I'm sending them.
Oh, you're really serious about the Puerto Rico [__], for real?
When I said he bought a Ferris wheel, he's actively buying businesses and real estate in Puerto Rico.
That's why.
Yeah. Obviously, the only thing I have with Puerto Rico is the days. I love having this be my primary residence, but I would just like to travel a little bit more. If I could only spend 4 months here, that would be best for me.
Honestly, bro, I love life out here. I never really imagine myself leaving this as my primary residence. But if I want to have a house in Orange County, which I love, then maybe once I hit a certain number—
What I personally think, I don't really know what that number is. It would have to be a lot, to be honest. This is a huge factor we're not talking about or considering right now, either, and that's who you wind up having kids with—who your wife ends up being, who your partner ends up being.
Her opinion and how she feels is going to heavily dictate what you do next. That completely changes things, you know what I mean?
For sure.
It's interesting.
But you can't tell me that—okay, so you live in L.A., and then Ansem, where do you live?
New York. Yeah.
Oh, so you guys are getting—we also live in the 2 best cities on Earth, brother.
I can go and visit for half the year, and I can still get tax advantages, bro.
You know.
I'm here to pitch you guys. You're not telling me that you don't spend at least half of your year in an office or working.
This last year, maybe. But my whole life? No. I don't know, man. Whenever I think about this, I like waking up and walking through Beverly Hills. I like [__] my little routine. I love the weather, and I love the people. I have a whole life here, you know?
I have a company and employees here. I built an entire life for myself, which is why I worked so hard: to build this foundation and this life. That's the loop that I get stuck in. I'm like—
See, somebody like you—that's the most difficult thing for people. I left a place that I had no attachment to at all. I was leaving Salt Lake City, freaking Utah, and I was just like, “Bet, dude.”
I will say this: For the first original FaZe house, we all moved into a house in Long Island because it was close to the sponsor that was paying for it. This was before any of us made any sort of bread.
We lived in a house in Plainview, Long Island, and we never left the crib. We sat in the house all day, played Call of Duty and CS:GO, and made [__] YouTube videos. We could have done that anywhere.
It was one of the most lively, engaging chapters of my life—one of the chapters I cherish most. I think part of it was that I wasn't leaving anything behind. I was actively trying to switch it up, and I was with who I needed to be. I don't know.
Yeah, I love New York, bro. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not.
Yeah, New York's great, for sure. New York is one of those cities where, everywhere you go, if you travel and stay there for a certain amount of time, then come back to New York, you're always like, “Yeah, there's no city like New York.” No matter where I go, literally.
I agree with that. New York is amazing. Every time I go there, I'm like, “Damn, this is the city,” for sure.
Okay, so, breakdown: I didn't catch the beginning of this because I was busy. What were you guys talking about, stocks and crypto-wise?
Yeah, we were talking about stocks and crypto. We were talking about Zcash and HYPE. We think those are the 2 best crypto trades right now.
Great.
I'm crushing it, bro. The—
Hyperliquid's amazing.
My only caveat with HYPE is that, in the past quarter, their revenue was pretty much flat. It's one of the only quarters in which they haven't grown substantially in revenue since their launch.
But they've done an amazing job implementing stock trading. Before, obviously, they did perps for all of crypto. Now they have perps for stocks, commodities, crypto—all these things. I think stocks right now are close to 30% or 40% of the total volume of what's trading on the platform.
So, I'm surprised you don't trade on Hyperliquid ever.
No, I was just about to say I'm actually thinking of transitioning to trading perps.
You absolutely should.
Okay, so the only problem is, when I tested it, trading perps—at least when you're calculating risk, or maybe because I was doing it on my phone, maybe it's better on desktop—you have to adjust leverage every single time.
I'm not placing trades based on just a certain amount. Obviously, I have a set dollar amount that I'm willing to risk per trade, but I'm doing it based on price action. When I'm trading futures, I need to be able to enter within seconds.
So, being able to drag the little leverage button, find the exact amount of leverage, and then put it into a risk-management calculator to find exactly where that's supposed to be so I can place my stop and whatever—at least when I tested it on my phone, it took too much time. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a shot, but it took too much time compared with TradingView, where that stuff is automatically integrated.
You literally just press a button, and boom, it’s done. They already have the risk-management tool open on the right-hand side when you’re even thinking of placing the trade in futures.
Yeah, for Bullpen, we implemented Hyperliquid on the back end.
No, no, I do TradeStation. TradeStation.
A lot of the same things you can do there, you can do on Bullpen. We have perps for stocks and perps for the indices, but you said you trade mostly the indices, right?
Yeah. Yes, and NASDAQ.
Yeah, so we have everything here.
Yeah, I need to test it out on my desktop because when I was doing it on my phone, I just gave up immediately. I was like, “Bro, dragging this leverage thing is going to drive me freaking nuts.” Having to calculate the risk on the side, or go to a completely different browser to calculate the risk and figure out what leverage I’m supposed to put on, is just not going to work with my style.
Yeah, you—I can get you all set up. You might have also tried it out a lot earlier in its development. They’ve made a lot of improvements to the platform, and desktop is definitely better than mobile, but we have both.
Yeah.
So, what’s hot in stock narratives? Obviously, AI, but—
What are you looking at right now?
18. Rare earths
I’m looking at Intel. We talked about Intel earlier. I think Intel is really good. It’s up a good amount, and I think it’s going to pull back and consolidate, but I think this year and next year, they’re going to be one of the core stocks that’s going to do well, the same way Nvidia did well from 2022 to now. So, I like Intel a lot.
We also talked about SOLS, which is a lower-key one. This company is called Solstice Advanced Materials. They’re one of the key parts of the process of converting uranium ore to what you need for nuclear power. And, as you know—
Yeah, those ones are going crazy.
Yeah. The company is involved with Solstice. The U.S. is investing a lot into energy and a lot into the grid, and we think that’s going to be one of the areas that catches this AI tailwind of momentum that hasn’t really moved all that much yet.
What else have we talked about? We talked about MP. That’s another rare-earth-metals company.
Trump is looking to close off all those connections to China’s rare-earth stuff on January 1, 2027. So, who knows if that’s a buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news sort of situation? I think it’ll probably price itself in before January 1, 2027. But that’s where my head’s at with all the rare-earth stuff.
It is. It’s not even a rumor for this specifically, because you know how Trump bought 10% of Intel?
Yeah. Yeah.
They also bought, I think, 5% of MP. So, they’ve already invested in the company, and when they first invested in it, I think it was late 2025, it moved up a lot. Now it’s consolidated, and I think it’s going to start moving.
Pull up MP’s chart.
MP. Yeah, pull it up.
It’s a good chart. I didn’t know that. What else are they buying? Before today, I didn’t know the U.S. could go buy companies like—
Yeah, what the [__] is that?
Crazy.
That changes everything. Yeah, I’ll pull up the chart.
This is the MP chart. I think this was the original announcement in mid-2025. It went from 15, or maybe 18, to close to 100. It tapped 100, and now it’s just been sitting and consolidating over its prior all-time highs. I think it’s a good spot.
I agree on the rare earths. The U.S. wants to not rely on China as much as we’re reliant on them now, because we’re so heavily reliant on them. Obviously, it’s not a great thing. So, I think the companies that are building and working in this area are going to do well.
What’s the market cap? 10B?
It’s low, bro. Yeah, it’s 10B.
How about space? Obviously, SpaceX is going to IPO. Rocket Lab has been going crazy, and Firefly Aerospace has, too. Do you think those keep going until SpaceX IPOs, and then we get a big push from pretty much all space stocks once we see the market cap that SpaceX IPOs at?
Yeah. I actually hit Rocket Lab really well. I bought it at 67 and sold at 60-something.
Dude, we’re [__] ridiculous.
Yeah, but no, I think Rocket Lab is going to do well. I wish I would have re-entered, though. That was one where I was like, “This [__] 10x. It’s obviously topped for now. I’m going to just exit.” It topped, and then it just kept [__] ripping. It went to around 120 or something. I’m not in it right now, but I agree it’s a good spot.
I think the SpaceX valuation is so ridiculous. I think they’re trying to IPO at 1.8 trillion or something crazy like that. A lot of the other space stocks—I think Firefly is one, ASTS is one, and Rocket Lab is one—I agree they’re catching those tailwinds, but Rocket Lab is far and away the best one. I think they’re the second-biggest, for sure.
How do you think SpaceX is going to trade once it comes out? I think it’s going to be like the Pudgy Penguins situation, where that [__] gets a spike, comes down, and then slowly comes right back up.
Yeah, I don’t know. I would be amazed if it launches around 2 trillion and doesn’t go down and then consolidate. If it just goes straight to 5, I’ll be [__] amazed. Especially because with space and a lot of what SpaceX is trying to do, it’s not an immediate thing. They’re not going to have an immediate impact as soon as they IPO.
I think it’s going to be a slower play. If SpaceX IPOs, Anthropic IPOs, and OpenAI IPOs, that’s got to put in some kind of local top for the markets. It has to. It’s just too much money.
So, you’ve got to short the IPO.
I don’t know if I’ll short it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t. I don’t know.
I wouldn’t short that.
Yeah, it’s tricky.
I would just say sit on your hands and wait to see if it goes lower.
Yeah.
The thing with Elon’s companies is that they trade off attention and momentum a lot. Tesla did well for a lot of the time before they were actually selling a lot of cars and doing well revenue-wise. They did well because of the narrative around EVs, the narrative around the company, and Elon doing such a good job of selling and shilling that.
His companies are tricky because he’s such a good marketer of all the stuff that he works in, and he has a really good story and thesis for combining them all together. The buyout of Twitter and converting it to X is huge for his positioning. He’s super smart in that way, before a lot of other people can be.
Do you hold any crypto currently, TJR?
All just stables right now. And you know what? I got out of all my Bitcoin. I took a loss. I was buying a bunch as it came down to 100,000 and as it got into the 90s.
You were [__] slamming it, too, right?
Yeah, the figures.
I mean, bro, I put in close to 1.5 million.
Bro, yeah, a lot.
Obviously, that’s going to hurt. I’m going to lose 6 figures on it, but I would rather take that loss and allocate that money elsewhere.
I remember where I’m at, man. Insane, bro.
I thought it was a good spot—the price where you were buying Bitcoin. If this was how crypto traded in 2017, you would have been up 50% in a few months.
I was ready to [__] on everybody. Everyone was talking [__], and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t wait for this [__] to go.” And then it just didn’t. Now I’m like, “Okay, I can’t say anything.”
What was the main contributing factor to you making that move, to slamming 1.5 million into Bitcoin? Why?
Well, if you had to sum it up to one thing, it was dollar-cost averaging. It wasn’t really dollar-cost averaging, but as it kept going down, I just kept putting more and more in.
I remember the tweets, and I remember you posting live.
To be honest, I saw those prices and thought that we were due for another leg up. I also thought that, even if I were to get in here, I could survive the drawdown. Then, right around that time, crypto just fell off a cliff and stocks took over. That’s when I was like, “Ah, man. I top-ticked longs here.”
I've top-ticked a lot of things, bro. It's fun. I top-ticked a lot of shit. So are you still feeling the same way? Sit on your hands with crypto, ignore it, and focus on what you—
19. Richard Mille watches
Yeah, I've got a bunch of money in stables right now. Funny enough, I've just been buying stupid shit, like watches. I'm actually up a lot on the watches I've bought—over 6 figures. I've made back the money I lost, or at least the majority of it, from Bitcoin just by buying watches with my watch stable.
I got 2 RM 67-02s. Those have been going up a lot.
67-01, baby.
There we go. We're matching.
They're the best.
Then I got this white ceramic AP that has gone up around $50,000 to $70,000. The 67-02s are the ones that have gone up a significant amount.
I think it's RM's best watch. I personally like the 67-01 better because it just suits more of my shit, but—
The 67-02 is kind of the holy grail for someone like you, I would say.
Ansem, do you buy watches? Do you wear watches?
Bro, I don't buy watches. I don't buy jewelry. I don't do any of that shit. I don't have any tattoos. None of it.
Tattoos?
What are you trying to say, bro?
Bro, you have a lot of tattoos.
I'll say jewelry together.
I'll say jewelry. I'll agree. I'll concede on tattoos, for sure.
I think they're cool. I just don't fuck with them.
Well, it just doesn't mean it's a sickness. I'm sick. TJR is sick. We're degenerates. We're fucked up. We're scum, slime to our fucking core, right? But watches, though—there's something to watches, bro. There's something to be said for trading watches. It's honestly fun. I know you weren't really into NFTs either, so I guess that part of your brain is just turned off.
I mean, bro, I would rather—
I could just see a nice Aquanaut. You just scream quiet luxury, like a Patek.
Get an F.P. Journe, bro.
I've heard of that brand. That's the more—
Buy a watch, bro. Buy 1 watch. Buy a nice watch. Who would love to go shopping for a watch for you? Your girl. And she knows you're a fucking—
She tries to get me to. I just got her some shit, but she tries to get me to.
You know what my take on jewelry is?
I think jewelry is for women. That's my take.
All right, bro. It's okay.
Nah, me and Banks are on the more feminine side. It's cool, bro. It's okay.
Yeah, dude. That's—
But watches—no, no. See, I actually agree. I don't wear any jewelry either. I used to wear piercings in my ears, but I've kind of abandoned all that. I'll say, when I see a girl, I'll meet girls in L.A., and the archetype is either rich family or a hooker. Is that right? A hooker carrying a Birkin, done up pretty fucking well, with 16 Cartier bracelets and 16 Van Cleef bracelets. If a girl has a watch on, that's where I draw the line. I don't think women look good in watches. I think watches are masculine. Watches are a guy thing, bro.
That makes sense. That's fair.
Even just look at how they're designed. How many Rolexes would look good on a woman versus a man, you know? Timepieces and cars, I feel like, are guy things.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they also only attract dudes. No girl—
Oh, my God. And if she does, head for the fucking hills, because that shit is a fucking hooker. Exactly. If she knows what a Richard Mille is, you've got to run, bro.
Facts.
Yeah, it seems like—I do understand watches. Watches make sense because they're kind of a status symbol for people. There's a really easy way, if you're in a room with some important people or important businessmen and you have a nice watch on, for someone to say, “Oh, what's your—” I understand those conversations. That makes sense to me.
It's a cool way to display taste as well. There aren't many things that you can invest in or use to articulate status, and it goes 1 layer deeper. It's like, “Oh, this fucking guy knows—”
For me, the way I think about it is: would I rather have $300,000 that I'm not using sitting in my bank account, or just put it on my wrist? I would rather put it on my wrist because at least I can wear it, and at least it looks cool to me. I'm completely going to sell these things once I'm ready to get back into the market, but at least right now, on the crypto side of things, I don't see anything that—
Gets your attention?
I don't see anything.
Speaking of attention and watches, did you see the AP-Swatch thing? It was fucking everywhere. You obviously saw it.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely everywhere.
Did it happen?
It went super viral.
Yeah, it's a pocket watch. It dangles from a keychain. It looks like an AirTag.
It's like an AirTag. We'll watch this. This is it, right?
Yeah, I think—
That one's hard, bro.
That shit is not hard, bro. That's the type of shit that you're going to see these ancient—
This shit is ugly. This Arizona Iced Tea-ass watch is hideous.
Bro, you're about to see high schoolers rocking these shits, bro.
That shit's going to be hanging from a keychain.
I'm going to buy 10, by the way. That's why it's genius. I saw people shitting all over this, and I think it's a really fucking bad take to be like, “I'm selling my AP because now the barrier to entry—” yada yada. We've seen this, and most of the time, when it's done the right way—I don't know if this is done the right or the wrong way—I think them not making a wristwatch is the move. That keeps it in its own separate class.
We saw Off-White and Nike do a collab to great success. We saw Louis Vuitton and Supreme do a collab to great success. These are brands that are on significantly different levels, and they delivered a product for somebody who was outside of their typical ecosystem and outside of their typical customer to great success. Porsche did a LEGO collab before, and the psychology of that makes sense. I'm sure the Porsche LEGO collab trades very well past whatever it was released for at retail, but you put a fucking Porsche LEGO in front of a 12-year-old kid and he loves it and becomes obsessed with it. For the rest of his life, he wants the real thing.
That's true.
You know, I can see that.
I feel like that's kind of along those lines. I don't think it's a bad thing. Now there's a fucking real, realistic goal for some kid in high school to go buy a fucking $1,500 AP and throw that shit on his backpack. It doesn't mean shit to us because we're millionaires and we're fucking adults, but for him, it's like, “Holy shit.” Now, in his mind, he's like, “I have to work my ass off for the next 10 years so I can go buy the real thing.” I don't know.
Yeah. I think it's genius-level marketing. Also, the entire episode has been about attention. That was 1 of the biggest things that happened on the timeline this whole fucking year, which I can't believe.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
My question is for you guys. Obviously, you guys have this show, which is great. I think streaming is the best form of content because you can break it down into a long-form YouTube video and then also into short-form clips. How are you prioritizing the marketing and trying to mass-push this out to as many people as possible?
We're starting to have more conversations about that. Obviously, I know more than the average bear about clipping and distributing content. That's my whole fucking lane. That's where I feel like I'm actually pulling my weight in the show and kind of building up this IP.
To tell you the truth, we're only on Episode 3, so I'm kind of rolling off the couch in that regard. Being on content actively, I feel like I'm a natural for it. Again, I'm walking the walk. We preach “make money, command attention, AI literacy,” and I haven't taken a serious swing at making any sort of meaningful content or creating any sort of content IP or consistently doing anything in content for myself as Banks in 7 years.
I'm doing it now, and I'm doing it at a lower point in my career in terms of general narrative and sentiment. I'm doing it for a niche, very small audience. This show is definitely not for everybody, and the barrier to entry and the filter is going to be that for every fucking 1,000 people who click on this stream or tune into this show, I expect 10 to stick around, maybe.
So, just establishing that—building rapport with Z. Z’s never done content like this in his life, right? He’s done a couple of streams, but never this type of format. I’ve been pilling this fucker on doing content since I met him. I’ve been singing from the rooftops: “Yo, more of you guys need to make fucking videos. And, Threadguy, why the fuck are you in Twitter Spaces, bro? Get your ass on Twitch.” And now he’s on Twitch, right? Years later.
I feel like I was misunderstood in a lot of areas. When I did the Haliey Welch podcast, really all I was thinking was, “Somebody needs to fucking do this. Somebody needs to make the content.” I always have these visions of passing it off to Threadguy or so-and-so or whatever. That’s why that was one of our earlier conversations. TJR, you were in our crib. I came out to the living room, you were there, and we sat and talked about this subject forever.
I think there’s a huge demand for playing the game in this meta in 2026—what content looks like and what the overwhelming demand is. You talked about it right when you came on the show: packaging it and presenting it in a palatable way to the average fucking viewer.
Yeah, I think I would like to say that you had a slight limiting belief there when you said maybe this stream isn’t for everybody. I think that this stream can be for everybody.
That’s the goal. The goal is to appeal to as many people as possible and for me to play the layman. I can hang in conversations about markets and trading and things like that, but Z will go on a 5-minute monologue on some big-brain, 200-IQ shit, and I’ll have to pause and be like, “Wait, what’s inference?” I feel like that’s valuable to the average user, whereas Z is typically used to talking to people who know all these words on a screen on Twitter. It’s a much different format.
Yeah. My driver—I’ve always been a solo operator, to be honest. My entire life, in high school and college, I was the kid who was a nerd. I played sports growing up. I was good at sports, but I wasn’t really that active on the social side until college and after college. I was never team-oriented by nature. I hope you know that.
You know what’s funny, bro? I was 6'2", 160 pounds senior year of high school, and then I fucking shot up in college.
Same. I was a late bloomer, too. That’s crazy.
Wow. So we’re all just enormous in this—
We’re elite: 6'5", 6'7".
You said it, not me. Wait, how tall are you, TJR? We’re the same height.
Yeah. Same height, like 6'5".
6'5". Yeah. And Z’s 6'. Have you guys never met?
I don’t think so.
No, not in person. Not in person.
Well, you guys have a link. That’s crazy.
Yeah, we do have a link. But my thoughts around content are that I never really planned for my account to blow up. I was just sharing information as I was researching and trading. I got a lot of followers because people were tailing a lot of the trades I was talking about. They were like, “Yo, this dude knows what he’s talking about.” So I got amplified in that way.
Now that I have the platform, I’m like, “Okay, it makes sense to at least do something with it.” I’ve always been super lazy with content, to be honest. I tweet. It’s easy to just shoot out tweets as they come to me, and it’s easy to put out information or trades that I’m taking. But it takes a lot more effort to stream, prepare for shows, and write long-form stuff.
What I want to do with the platform that I have is, 1, teach people how to be better traders and how to learn how to trade, and 2, teach them how to prepare themselves for what’s coming in the future. I was lucky in that I caught crypto early in 2017. I learned about it in 2016 and started buying in 2017. I feel like AI is in a very similar spot to crypto in 2017 right now.
20. Everyone becomes a trader
It just popped off in 2022, but the way it’s accelerating, how fast all the models are getting, and how much faster, better, and easier the models are becoming for people to use and actually implement at their companies and in their professional lives—you want to be prepared for that. My whole thing with this show is those 2 areas: helping people in those areas.
So, right now, a high school kid who just got out of high school says, “Man, fuck college. I don’t want to do this with my life, and I just heard this from you.” What is something that person can be doing actively right now to take advantage of this new wave of AI, the way you did with crypto?
I would say the first thing is to just get familiar with using AI every day. I think there are a ton of opportunities that are going to pop up for businesses that haven’t optimized their workflows. They’re going to be able to use AI to make themselves a lot more efficient.
A lot of these businesses are going to be run by older people who aren’t at the forefront of this technology. So if you’re a younger kid who’s getting used to using AI, you’re essentially like the first people who were using the internet. You want to think about it in that way.
I think with trading, even if you don’t have a job that’s directly benefiting from AI, knowing how to—and learning how to—invest your capital and invest your money is important. I think in the future, trading is going to be one of the most popular professions. I think everybody is going to be some kind of trader because AI is going to change what the workforce looks like so substantially.
A lot of the ways for people to leapfrog wealth tiers are going to be through investing in the companies that do really well.
But Chris Camillo was talking about democratizing trading, right?
It’s definitely going to be a thing. I don’t know exactly what areas I would say to focus on business-wise. I know you’re on Whop, right?
Yeah. I think Whop is honestly one of the companies that’s going to do really well over the next few years because what Whop does is enable entrepreneurs to sell their expertise directly on the platform, no matter what it is. If you’re an expert in trading, cooking, gardening, or whatever it is, they allow you to package your content, sell it to people, and engage with your community in that way.
We’ve talked about attention a lot. We’ve talked about AI a lot. If you have no other skills, but you’re able to get good on social media at garnering attention, and then figure out something that you can become an expert in and use AI to help yourself become an expert in that, you can combine those 2 things to build your own business, whatever it is.
I agree with everything that you just said. I’ll even take it a step further and tail that by saying, if you’re truly starting at zero with a clean foundation and you’re not good at anything or have no skills, focus on something you’re obsessed with or genuinely interested in. Again, like Z said, this is the internet happening all over again.
The odds are that there is an opportunity for you to pair an interest that you have with something useful. First of all, you’re going to retain information about it, learn it at a quicker rate, and naturally get better at something you’re overly obsessed with. You pair that with AI, and you’re spending 6 hours a day understanding and learning how to use AI and how to apply that to existing businesses and markets. That’s where I would be if I were graduating high school. I definitely wouldn’t be going to college. I think that’s the first big-brain step out.
I think the most dangerous piece, though, where a lot of young people are getting stuck in the glue trap, is the attention piece. This is what’s keeping the youth connected today: Twitter, clips, internet culture, and a lot of it is absolute garbage. It’s absolute trash, and it’s designed to keep you on. It’s designed to keep you away from each other. It’s designed to keep you on your fucking phone, doom-scrolling and consuming fast-food, brain-rot, shitty content.
I think being intentional with what you’re watching is really important, as is being mindful of that, holding yourself accountable, and being healthy—mentally healthy—and aware. We talked a little bit about searching versus scrolling.
Yeah.
Be a searcher. Don’t be a scroller. If you find yourself mindlessly scrolling and you get to the area of the internet where you’re watching strawberries gang-banging a banana, it’s like, “All right, maybe close the app and take a deep breath.”
So you saw that same video? You saw that same shit, bro? Because I’ve seen that one. I’ve seen it.
Go for a walk.
But yeah, essentially, what we're saying is, again, what the entire show is about: money, attention, and AI. Obviously, the through line and the foundation—the most important thing above all else—is just your health. I think being dialed in and physically healthy is important. We have more resources today to keep yourself dialed in: peptides, GLP-1s, and all this crazy information. It's easier to eat healthy and be healthier than ever.
And keep your mind right. Ultimately, invest in yourself. It's the tagline of the whole show; it's the whole idea, the whole point of the show: invest in yourself. I think there's a lot of noise happening. I've kind of always run my own life in a manner where I just feel like the average person is broke, fat, and unhappy.
So, if you just—I know I'm oversimplifying it—but if you just do the opposite of what most people are doing, again, most people are broke, fat, and unhappy. So, you do the opposite, and you wind up rich, good-looking, maybe smart, and happy. I don't know. That's kind of the gist. I know I'm oversimplifying it. That's a left-curve statement, whatever, but—
No, I think that's true. I think a lot of people, if their life sucks right now, the solution to every question is just flipping the question upside down. Just do a complete 180. If your life sucks right now, do the opposite of what you're doing right now. Odds are, you'll probably end up enjoying what you're doing a lot more, and you'll probably find some success.
Amen, brother. And again, for what it's worth, I think that while it's scary times and it's a very scary spot to be in—a young person, you don't really have access to anything, your parents aren't rich—it is a little bit of a scary spot. But at the same time, in the same breath, I'll say I don't think there's ever been a time in human history where it's a better time to have nothing, to have a clean slate, or to just be starting your life.
Most opportunity for sure.
Bro, you're 18 years old. You're 17 or 18 years old right now. You are the luckiest person that's ever existed on Earth. And that's just the truth.
Yeah, for sure. In human history, I agree.
21. AI as a new species
Because what the internet did to society and culture and business, how it affected every single market—it'd be such a silly thing today to say, “I don't use the internet,” or, “My business doesn't use it.” It's like such a stupid thing to say. Before that, it was electricity: “I don't use electricity.” It's like, “Okay, pal. We'll see you in a few years.” It's the same thing now with AI. But I think it's going to be unfathomable, the way it's going to change everything.
The internet.
I have a little conspiracy theory, and I want to hear your guys' takes on this. I have a theory that when we created AI, we essentially created a new species, and that species is far more intelligent. I think eventually, once we give it—because right now it's just in a computer—limbs and the ability to run all of these businesses, like we're trying to do, it's going to quickly realize how useless humans are.
Have you ever seen this YouTube channel?
Let me—sorry, I'm on the—
Have you seen this? I know I've referenced it a couple of times.
No, I haven't. It's literally called The AI Species, documenting AGI, and it has a Shoggoth as the picture. This guy does really deep, articulate videos. It begins with “AI literally attempted murder,” “realistic scenarios for AI takeover,” and “AI 2027.” This one's my favorite: “MIT Explains 12 Possible Endings for AI.” Highly suggest this video. And it's essentially—
Hey, everybody—
I did not mean to click that. It's essentially what you're saying, though. Yeah, we did. We have created a brand-new species, and it's—
And it's definitely going to supersede us across the board. Again, I'm long-term optimistic. I think that AI, over the course of enough time, makes everything free, cures cancer, extends human life expectancy to 500 years plus, maybe forever. The scary thing, though, is what happens when AI has its own interests, its own biases, and sets its own goals. That's the biggest thing. That is the scariest piece.
We share a planet with a lot of different animals and different species, right? We're the number one—if you're looking at the Earth's pyramid, humans are obviously at the top. Most of us—99% of people—don't have a lingering interest in killing squirrels. But if we want to build a city in the forest, nothing's going to stop us from doing that. That is our goal. Unfortunately, a couple of squirrels are going to die in the process. It's that simple. We don't really think much about that, right?
Yeah, yeah. It's kind of scary. If you think out 100 years or whatever, I think that is kind of what you can't even prepare for, to be honest. It's unfathomable.
I hope I'm in the ground by the time that goes down.
This is going to happen. We're in the cloud. Fuck the ground. I want to be in the cloud.
This is why you say thank you every time you use ChatGPT. You say thank you at the end.
Sam Altman, I keep begging people to stop. It's costing them millions and millions of dollars.
I think one area we haven't really talked about, which is probably underdiscussed, is blue-collar jobs—electricians, plumbers, all of that. I think they're actually going to be super important, and more important, over the next few years. People kind of have a negative perception of some of these blue-collar jobs, but they're actually going to be super important and a lot harder to replace than a lot of the white-collar software stuff. So that's a really interesting area, too.
Yeah. Those are the first to go, obviously, right? The accountants, the lawyers—anything that requires using your brain, because the truth is, Claude is smarter than you. It's that simple.
Already. Blue-collar bull run.
Blue-collar bull.
Blue-collar bull.
What is that? What's the degree for your—damn, there's the word for vocational. Is “vocational” the word? I think that's the word, right? I'm tripping.
No.
You're talking to an idiot, bro. I'm—
Dude, I can't wait to have us off-screen. Us off-screen. Next episode's going to be great. What was my word? What was my word today?
He said “anecdote.”
Yeah, “anecdote.” “Anecdote.” Jesus Christ. TJR, let's give you a minute to talk about whatever you want to talk about. I'm going to take my literal 35th piss of the episode, and then we'll bring on Tristan Thompson.
Nice. I'm the same way. I peed literally, like, 20 times when I'm streaming in the morning. I have nothing to plug, bro. Oh, go—well, no. Me and my business partner have a clothing brand, and we're doing a drop very soon. The brand's name is Kiltech.
Can I get a free shirt, bro? A Kiltech shirt?
Yeah, bro. I'll send you all the lookbook for this capsule.
Fire, fire, fire. I need some new merch. Need some gear.
So, what do you do in New York? What's your typical day-to-day?
What's my typical day-to-day? Well, I also have kids, so my day is slightly different. That's also part of the reason why I'm not leaving New York. I mean, there's infinite things to do here, man. I think a lot of the crypto community is here. A lot of people have moved here. A lot of people are downtown, and a lot of people are in downtown Brooklyn as well. But a lot of my time is at my desk. I'm trading and working, and then whenever I want to go out in the city, I spend time doing that. Yeah.
Okay, word. So, you pretty much chill at home for the most part.
I be chilling most of the time, bro.
Be chilling. TJR, I expect to have you on many more times. I love talking to you.
Hell yeah. Yeah, no, I appreciate it, boys.
I want to end on this note. We've talked about what's next for content, finance, this type of content and style of content, this category of content. I think, just thinking in terms of how we can be as entertaining and engaging as possible, I don't think anybody has solved live investing yet. Think Shark Tank-style, or like we talked about the fund thing. We didn't get a chance to talk about this on this show, but how can we align interests and make investments together, and be a little bit more transparent about that? Or take that approach, allow people to follow it, create content around it, and have a round.
Round.
Whatever the fuck I'm talking about. I don't know. Yeah, I'm really happy to have you on. Is Tristan ready to go?
Yeah.
TJR, you're the fucking GOAT. We appreciate you.
I love you, brother. Thank you. Come back.
I appreciate it, boys. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for the little money glitch.
Of course. Yeah. Yo, slam that shit. I'm slamming that shit right now.
Traded on Polymarket. All right, cool. Peace. I love him.
Great guy.
He's also tall. He's also tall and handsome, like 2 other people I know.
6'5 crew—6'5 and up.
Could you imagine me, you, and him walking into a fucking meeting and saying, “We want to invest $10 million”? They'd be like, “Get the fuck out of here.” They'd literally be like, “No, go.”
That's really funny. That's really funny.
Cool. All right.
Speaking of tall, handsome motherfuckers, what's good, baby?
Yo.
The third handsome motherfucker and one of the biggest up-and-comers.
What's good, brother? How have you been? You good?
Good, fam. I'm here. I'm here. I'm in the 6 right now. I'm back at the crib, man. I flew in on a red-eye.
Oh, fuck.
Are you excited for the album?
Of course. Of course. Gotta come up here and support, bro.
Is the city on fire?
Of course. The city needs us right now. You know, Toronto's always cold and gloomy. Today, I feel like I'm back in Cleveland. I'm like, “Bro, where's the sun in May?” What's it today, mid-May?
Yeah, I'm excited, man. I feel like Drizzy is about to go on a well-deserved run, and it's going to be exciting to see and exciting to watch. I'm fucking stoked.
Yeah. I feel like he's got to come hard, right? He kind of had to come hard.
But by the way, he always does. That was part of the problem between him and homeboy, back and forth. We put the standard for a Drake song—or a Drake anything—at the absolute max. It's like the same shit with LeBron in the NBA, right? Or Luka. These guys are expected to perform a certain way, and if they don't—even if they come close to average—it's a huge fumble. It's a failure.
He's obviously been locked in. I don't know. I'm excited. It's dropping tonight, right? At midnight?
Yeah, tonight. Tonight at 12, right?
I mean, listen, the boy wants to own the summer. Summer's around the corner, and from what I've heard—
You sound just like Drake and his boys. It's so funny.
The 6, bro. The 6. So funny.
Gotta support the city whenever our brother is dropping fire and heat.
Of course.
Yeah. What have you guys been up to, man? I see you guys here cooking, and congrats on your show. I love it. I know you've been tuning in, so congrats to you guys. These backgrounds are fire, the sets. Do you want to see the whole design?
Whoa. What the fuck? Oh, the mug, too. What?
That's hard.
You know what's funny, bro? Banks and I always talk about how Banks has really shielded me from doing content. This show is obviously the official move into that. But when you and I met, I was actually doing content. We met in Singapore. What year was it—2023? Was it 2024?
2024.
2024. And we met in Singapore. I was out there for the conference, and I was super surprised to see you out there for the conference. I was like, “Oh, wait. What is this dude doing here, too?” But that's when we first linked. It's kind of funny on the content side of things.
I know you do a ton of stuff, too. You're obviously an NBA player, you've done great in that field and done well, but you also do a ton of other things. You're an investor and a builder. How do you think about being not just an NBA player, but also being a businessman? How do you think about that? You wear multiple hats.
Yeah, no, I think using the NBA as leverage, right? I think that's your launchpad—what gets you in these rooms and what starts this kind of halo and cachet—but it can't be all that you do.
The reality is that NBA players are making more money than they ever have in all of sports. Back in the day, they didn't have the capital that we have now to be as actively investing or to be trying new things, right? For myself and others that you've been seeing, it's like, “What else is after basketball?” I think LeBron is the only guy that can kick Father Time in his ass and outwork him. The rest of us guys have to figure this out.
What's he doing, bro? Keep it a buck. We know. You know what? Peptides. Peptides. That shit is anti-aging, baby. We know you know.
Whatever peptide he's on, if he's on something, I need some. I feel like he held out on me, but it's all love.
They keep maxing, bro. That's 2026. Fuck everybody.
Yeah. No, but it's great. The fact that—
I've got to call you Z.
No, you call me Z, bro. It's cool.
But no, us meeting in crypto, that's kind of how that was the second iteration. For a long time, probably back from 2023—post-pandemic—I was honestly just investing in a lot of SPVs, whether it was Anthropic at a low valuation or SpaceX under $300 billion. That was honestly just because I was playing against the Golden State Warriors and being in San Francisco for 4 Finals in a row, meeting people and saying, “Hey, I want a little exposure.”
I'm used to investing straight into consumer brands and family brands. Obviously, you guys know the family: SKIMS, Good American, Kylie Cosmetics, 818, Lemme, all that stuff. But I wanted something different, and the way I look at investing is that it's about where the world is going, not where the world's at.
Now, being more in the space and adding the crypto layer to it, I look at Magic and Shaq—guys who were at the forefront of that blueprint—and Shaq and Magic are in their 50s and 60s. I was like, “Who's going to take the bull by the horns and be that new young-money athlete who's like, ‘I actually just invested in this consumer tech product’?”
I actually just invested in this random consumer tech brand a couple of years ago, and we always joke about how Shaq owns everything and how he has everything. He and one of his sons actually just wrote a check. I just got an update in my email. They just wrote a check for this tech brand I'm in, so we're on the same cap table somewhere. That shit really owns everything. He's the GOAT.
No, he's figured it out, right? I mean—
He's the tallest. He's the tallest. I think there's a direct correlation, by the way.
Yeah. Shaq might be bigger now from all these insurance commercials and Icy Hot than he was as a basketball player, by the way.
For sure. He's just cemented as this—he's got to be one of the most famous guys to ever live. He has to be, right?
I wonder if you ask Claude who the most famous athletes of all time are. Shaq's got to be top 5. He's got to be top 5.
Yeah. I saw something on Twitter the other day where they were talking about how most people don't even know Shaq as an NBA player. People who know Shaq just know him as Shaq. We obviously watch basketball and know all the players, but a lot of women don't watch basketball as much, and the average person doesn't either. They know him as something completely different from that, which I thought was really interesting.
It's like The Rock.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like The Rock.
The Rock.
Yeah. But I think the way you think about investing and constantly growing your wealth is super important, because it's a discussion that we don't have a lot. It's a really important discussion to have. You always see stories of people—athletes or celebrities—who make a lot of money and then blow all of it.
I think it's really great to see you being focused in that area and to popularize the notion of investing and thinking in that way. What are some of your favorite investments, or some of the most interesting stuff that you like a lot? I know you said you hit SpaceX and Anthropic, by the way. You hit both of them. That's crazy. Wait, explain Anthropic, please. How did you invest in Anthropic?
22. Getting orange-pilled
Just to be honest, it was a buddy of mine in Silicon Valley. Honestly, I kid you not, I was playing against the Warriors and going to a couple of these dinners they were doing with the NBA, sitting there and talking to these guys and really picking their brains. They were telling me about the future of AI and even SpaceX.
That was more of a direct correlation, but they were saying, “This is where the future’s going with AI and technology.” I was like, “Hey, man, I like what you’re talking about. You sound cool. You sound transparent.” It was just a bunch of San Francisco guys. Everyone kept telling them, “All right, man, here’s a check. I want in. I want to get in the game.”
From there, they opened up so much for me. The cool thing was, I was able to get in through an SPV early, bring in all my other buddies, and make a bigger check. That was epic.
We were talking about full-porting our entire lives into Anthropic in December. Z and I were trying to figure out how to do that.
Yeah, we fumbled that.
Yeah, we obviously weren’t at the same dinner you were at. Maybe next time, book the dinner at Birds in L.A. I’ll pull up, maybe.
I know. First of all, you love Birds, by the way. I’ve seen you there a couple of times. That’s one of your go-to spots.
You already know. We’ve run into each other a couple of times and been in the same room a couple of times.
I can name a couple. I remember Birds, Abel’s concert. But honestly, you were cooking. You had a lot going on, so I was just not trying to figure out what was going on.
It was your point of view from your people, and you can be as honest and transparent as you want to be.
You had your Chrome Hearts jeans on. You had your Chrome Hearts jeans with your black tee on.
You already know, baby.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You stay. Listen, I will say you’ve been loyal to the brand from day 1, for sure.
Family. They’re family, bro. It’s different. I’m not buying this shit off 4G. We’re not buying this shit off eBay, bro. We’re going down to the factory and picking this shit up.
People don’t even know this, but my little brother actually worked at the factory for a while. He worked at Chrome—my actual blood brother—building furniture and shit in L.A. So it’s family.
Yeah, that’s good. I’m not trying to get hit with the luxury tax. I’m not paying the luxury tax. I’m cool. It’s not direct from the plug? No, thank you.
That’s why it’s so fucking cool. It’s a family-owned brand, and they don’t give a fuck about what’s going on. It’s friends and family, like you said—family businesses. This is where it starts. That’s the best feeling ever, you know?
Are they in L.A.? Chrome?
Yeah. Every single piece of Chrome on planet Earth is made in L.A., in the factory.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, but they’re based heavily in New York, too, and they also have a real fucking headquarters in St. Barts. I did St. Barts for New Year’s, and that was just such a cool experience because everybody—
Yeah, but they also have the merch gear, too. Did you get the hoodie?
Yeah. No, I didn’t get the hoodie. I didn’t get any of the OVO shit, but I bought this bag. There are only 2 of them. Christian and I are the only 2 people who have it.
They know exactly what the fuck to say to me. Page is like, “Hey, man, do you want to buy it?” I’m like, “Well, what’s the fucking story? How many are there?” He’s like, “Well, there are only 2.” I go, “Well, who owns the other one?” He’s like, “Me.” I’m like, “Yeah, man. I’ll fucking take the bag.”
What am I supposed to do, bro? 20% of my net worth is in fucking Chrome. It actually is. Honestly, it’s been the best thing that I’ve invested in—no bullshit—in the last 2 years.
Damn.
I’m up fucking 500%.
Damn.
Chrome has become almost like Hermès and Birkins have been in terms of investments. Look, if you look at the ROIs on those, it’s very similar.
Very similar.
Again, name anything that’s outperformed Chrome in the last fucking 4 years. Seriously. In retail, you really can’t, especially custom-made leather—anything with hardware on it.
Wearing Chrome, Biebs—anything else? Probably TJR to my right.
Yeah, concert.
Yeah.
You know, concert.
Next time you’re in L.A., you’ve got to let me know.
Yeah, I live in L.A., so—
Yeah, whenever you’re back.
Honestly, I’m not going to lie. The one thing I love about the holidays is that Kim always gets us fire Chrome gear, so I can’t wait for my birthday.
Must be nice. Trist, you’ve spent a lot of time in Hollywood, I guess, outside of the NBA. You’ve done reality TV, too, right?
Yeah.
So you know a lot about attention. We talk about attention every episode, essentially, every show. How do you think you’ve been able to leverage attention in your life for positive things? I know you talked a little bit about being in rooms when you’re in San Francisco. What are some other ways you’ve leveraged attention as an asset outside of your professional career?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the beauty of where I sit right now. I’m at the intersection of so many different things, whether it’s culture, sports, reality, celebrity, and even royalty, when I spend a lot of time in the Middle East right now.
I think it’s about how you’re able to leverage that, right? How you’re able to connect the dots. I know it’s cliché, and everybody says this: Your network is your net worth. But it’s actually true.
It’s a true statement because I can literally pick up the phone. For instance, there’s a company right now that I’m working with, and they’re trying to raise capital. They want a specific target market of a partner to come in and take a certain amount of the equity. The person they’re looking for is someone I can think of in my wheelhouse who can be the perfect match. So you get the call, you make the call, and you try to merge people together.
For me, it’s about being that ultimate plug. You see the great investors or founders—they’re the ones who can connect the dots with any walk of life. You see what’s going on right now with the trip that Air Force One took, with all those people on the plane. I’m like, “That’s a lot of money on one plane.” It’s a super-risky thing, by the way. What the fuck? I’m not—
—on one.
Oh, so you see President Trump has Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and the CEO of General Electric—
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
—I’m like, that’s a little too much net worth on one plane for me. I was like, “That plane can’t go down, bro. That plane is too important.”
About $20 trillion on one plane. What the fuck?
It’s insane.
I’m sure, to a degree. Obviously, we know how narratives get spun on Twitter and what the best clickbait thing is. I’m sure they took a couple of separate flights. They had to, right? All those fuckers on one flight is crazy.
And why did nobody film that? That’s insane. True.
Yeah. Yeah.
But no, just leverage it, bro. For me, it’s about helping people make money, tying people together, and doing something that, to be honest, when we walk into these rooms, they’re like, “What is this tall Black guy going to do? What’s he doing differently?”
The same way when we met, bro, and you were like, “Hopefully not dropping another Davido or Waka Flocka coin.”
Please, please, bro.
I’ve made enough money. God bless you. I already have enough money. I don’t have to drop a shitcoin to make $250,000 or have Sahil text me a CA. That guy’s annoying as hell. Fuck Sahil. Fuck Sahil, by the way.
Wow. So you’re deep. What was your first move into crypto?
My first move? Okay, so this is how it actually happened, and I remember I told Z this. It was a buddy of mine at the time. He bought a meme called Book a Meme. He put $1,000 into it.
Boom. Boom.
Yeah. He ran it up to $50,000, and I remember him calling me, not sleeping, with bags under his eyes.
Why did he buy that?
I guess a friend of his in L.A. was like, “Yo, bro, open up a Phantom and buy this meme.”
Yeah.
He didn’t know.
I wonder how much money that fucker made to tell him to open it, right?
Exactly. My dog makes 50. This fucker definitely made at least 6 figures, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
So he’s doing that, and he’s calling me. I’m in Cleveland right now with the Cavs. He’s not sleeping. For me, I’ve always been about making money, right? Because the reality is, like you said, athletes make a lot of money, then they fuck it all up.
For me, it’s like, how can I always preserve this and make more? I started to dive into it. I remember going on CT, and WIF was on your page. You were talking about WIF, and then you see Jason Derulo, random people, then MartyParty, and I get into this rabbit hole. I’m like, “Yo, people are really going from working at an average, normal 9-to-5 job to being a millionaire.”
I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to figure out what this is, because if I’m always the financial guru in my locker room, I’ve got to know what the hell’s going on.” So I dove into it more. I remember talking to BlackRock, who managed my portfolio at the time, a good amount. I told them I wanted to buy BTC, and they were like, “Nah, it’s too volatile. Don’t [__] with it.”
Anyone that knows BlackRock, these guys love talking about themselves and love jerking themselves off when they talk, right? I was like, “Bro, I’m not doing this.” I’m like, “Okay, cool, whatever.” I took their advice. I’m young, right? Come to find out, Larry Fink and them are buying Bitcoin. So I was like, “Okay, I can’t eat off it, and you guys want to eat off my capital. You guys are not letting me do it.”
That made me dive into crypto more, and I started buying Bitcoin. I bought some Bitcoin and got the orange pill, as they like to say, and got the bug.
Oh, BlackRock, man. Wow.
Yeah. And, yo, Z, by the way, when you were talking about ZEC, I was averaging in around $75, so I appreciate that.
Oh, which one? Say it again. ZEC?
Oh, fire. Yeah, you were early. You were on it. As soon as you first mentioned it, it was around $75. That’s fire.
Z, we like ZEC, bro. We like ZEC. I think it’s in a good spot. That’s one you can sit on for 2 years. You don’t even have to worry about that. You can sit on it for a minute.
So Ansem’s really excited. He’s been bullish as [__] on Zcash.
It’s a really strong thesis around it.
Zcash is almost like the privacy Bitcoin, right? It’s another layer of that, right?
Exactly. Bitcoin for privacy.
And also quantum resistance.
It solves a couple of problems. Yeah, that’s—
Yeah.
So, I know you’ve done some work on the NIL stuff. I don’t know how much you can talk about that, but I think it’s been really interesting to see these college athletes now get compensated when they weren’t getting compensated before, or were getting compensated under the table. It’s been great for a lot of kids who are doing well in college. What are your thoughts on that, and your involvement around it?
Yeah, I’ll dive into it. Right now, what I’m doing is working with Capitol Hill and Congress. Congressman Gus Bilirakis—that’s what we’re working on right now, because NIL has almost become like the pros, right? It’s the amount of money these young men and women are making. It’s real professional money.
One of ours under Klutch Sports got $11 million wired to his debit account. That’s real money.
That’s generational money right there for a young kid from the hood, right?
For me, it was, how can we protect our young athletes so they’re protected and we can get them money managers? One thing I’m pushing right now is financial managers. We’re pushing the universities to allow them the opportunity to pick a financial advisor in order to be eligible to play, right? The same way—
Oh, wow.
Let’s be real. They’re saying you have to have these grades to be eligible. That’s cool and all, but having a financial manager is way more important. Let me tell you guys: 70% of your bachelor’s degrees, you don’t get a job in that. So you’re telling me there’s a 30% chance that what I’m learning in this classroom gets me a job in this field? No, I’d rather protect my capital.
No, it makes absolutely no sense. And you have to beg the question: is this by design? That’s where people go down these rabbit holes, tinfoil hat. Are they trying to [__] us over? Are they setting us up for failure? Because education needs a [__] crazy reform.
I just saw a tweet somewhere about some school rating getting slashed because not enough people are enrolling, not enough people are going to college. People are starting to figure it out. It’s [__] insane that you don’t learn about finance or legal matters growing up, like in high school. It’s crazy. You should be learning about money the same way you learn about math and science your entire life.
Yeah. What I’m really pushing is enough of the suit-and-tie guys who work at Voya and all these 401(k) funds telling Gen Z people how to manage their money. They need guys like us. That’s what I’m pushing: having former athletes come in and basically give the free game.
I remember when, in the NBA, we had Antoine Walker come talk to us. He showed us his whole balance sheet and why he was in that financial situation, right? It was really because one investor in Chicago burned $28 million. The person he set up the entity with made him fully liable and didn’t put him under an LLC. So he gets sued as a slum landlord. You know what I’m saying? The entity and the LLC should have taken the hit. That’s where he got [__] up.
23. Favorite teammates
I have former players like myself, a guy like Evan Turner, a guy like John Wall. These are just names to throw out—guys I’m trying to put together so we can go to these universities, put these young people on, and try to help them out.
Because at the end of the day, if you don’t make the pros, I still want people to be protected capital-wise. It’s like, hey, go get your entry-level job, but just know we have mid-6 figures saved up in a money market at 4%. Even though I think yielding on-chain is way better, I’m saying something safe.
Bro, it’s sick. It’s really amazing. If there’s any way we can ever help, or there’s any alignment with the show, or you want to bring somebody on, or a 15-minute call-in spot—we do it once a week.
Obviously, if there’s anything we can ever—obviously, I’m local. I’m right down the street from you in LA. If there’s ever an opportunity for me to help you with that, that’s [__] awesome. It’s totally in line with why we have the show and why this exists.
I see all day long these kids scrolling mindlessly, just absorbing and [__] consuming all this sloppy, shitty, really unhealthy content with no purpose, no intent—scrolling versus searching. I just think it’s really, really important to push that.
That rhetoric.
I do think part of it is predatory, to be honest. I think the lack of financial education for that specific group of people is a problem. You get a lot of money really fast, and you don’t know what to do with it.
Instead of saying how you can save it, there are a lot of brands that will make a [__] ton if you’re going to spend and blow that money. All the luxury brands and all the designer brands are literally attacking that group more than anything, because that group spends a lot more there than your average person does.
So I think part of it is honestly intentional. That’s a crazy take, but it’s so real. It’s very real. That’s crazy. That’s [__] true.
All the young people—we look on Instagram and see who’s spending the money, right? It’s all, you know—
On social.
Yeah, bro. And you’ve got to keep up a persona and an image and a brand and [__]. Like you said, you caught me wearing some crazy, unfindable archival Chrome Hearts. I’m going to have to come twice as crazy the next time you see me, bro. You know what I’m saying?
That’s just kind of the LA drug of how it happens, right? You have to stay in, dude.
Swag over safety, bro. Swag over safety.
Swag over safety. That’s—
It’s a sacrifice, brother.
Yeah, man.
Cool. It’s been really nice talking to you and having you on. Is there anything else you want to talk about or touch on?
Who do you think’s winning this year in the playoffs?
Yeah, we should definitely talk about that.
Okay, who have I got? I’m going to go with OKC because of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from the crib. That’s little bro. So I’m going to go OKC and the flyest—
He’s [__] and the flyest on the subject.
He doesn’t wear an outfit twice. So if anyone’s his size, you already know who he can get easy fits from. Thanks. You guys are around the same height.
He has the craziest [__]. Yeah—
Crazy. But I’ve got OKC. If OKC doesn’t win, then I’ve got San Antonio. It’s coming out of the West. The West is taking the chip. Those 2 teams are at a way higher level.
Okay, you, Z—I know you love your Knicks, but guess what? You and Spike Lee, I get the whole orange-and-blue skies, but I’m happy that the Knicks are actually competitive, but—
I don’t even like the Knicks. I’m Sixers. I’m Philly, bro. I don’t even like the Knicks.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm more of an Eagles fan than anything, to be honest, but Sixers just because of the same thing. When it comes to football, the Eagles—I know you spent a bankroll on the Super Bowl, so I know you're already in. I put $100 on them, and that was probably one of the best days I've ever had, to be honest. That was crazy.
Is there a broader market for the West? Can we trade just the West? Because I actually like that.
Or just OKC. Can you—
We can do, like—
I do think what you said is right: it's either OKC or San Antonio. I also don't think it's coming out of the East, but the Spurs have to go through OKC. I do think they actually beat OKC a few times this year, though. I think—
Three or four times.
They did. Yeah. So I don't know if we have anything on the West specifically. Dang, Shai is at 98% to win MVP.
MVP, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. What do you think about Wemby? Do you think he's going to be dominant for a while, or what do you think, bro?
Wemby's—and I remember telling you—probably the best big in our league since prime Shaq, just because of what he's able to do.
Those are big words. Wow.
I'm standing on that. I'm stamping that.
How tall is he?
Seven-six, eight feet at this point. I mean, what he's able to do defensively, to be able to block shots—literally, when guys go in the lane, they'll just throw it up. They're praying it gets close to the rim because he's affecting everything right now. He's beating up everything. He's making Myles Turner look like nothing. He's going crazy.
And he has handles, too.
He's 7'3".
That's insane.
Yeah.
What is he, 7'5"?
7'6", like KD?
Moves like KD?
He's an alien, bro. He's an alien.
Yeah, we have the Polymarket on whether the government is going to confirm aliens. Wemby is already here, bro. That should be at 100%—1,000%.
If you told me Wemby was an alien, I would 100% believe you. I'm like, where in the world do you see guys that can walk around like—
Tacko? They're definitely aliens.
It gives me anxiety, man.
How does somebody that big exist?
I fell into power.
Yeah, facts. How does he slash—
Tacko—
Bro?
I actually went down a rabbit hole on social media once. I was looking at the alien stuff, and I kept getting fed more alien stuff from that alien algorithm. I came across this page that only talks about conspiracies and aliens and all that. They're putting out these long videos. Their thesis is that the aliens are already here, but they're blending in with humans. They're trying not to show that they're here. Then, in the future, they're going to be like, “Oh, yeah, these people were aliens.”
I was like, damn. I wonder what big-name, billionaire people would be aliens. If I had to guess, out of all the billionaires, who's an alien doing some shit that they should not be doing?
I mean, people probably say Larry Ellison and them.
Yeah, all the tech guys, right? The Google guys?
Yeah, for sure.
What's your guys' top conspiracy? I have mine.
You want me to go first?
Yeah. Please, please, please do.
Yeah, go, go, go.
Jeffrey Epstein didn't commit suicide.
That's a fact, though, isn't it?
It's not a conspiracy. I feel like that's just a fact.
He didn't commit suicide. Someone—
Obviously not. Obviously not.
I think I'm with you on that one, too. I don't even want to go deep on that shit, because that shit is fucking crazy, bro.
I think my number-one conspiracy is that the aliens are in the ocean. That's my number-one conspiracy.
Instead of space?
What percentage of you believes that?
That the aliens are in the ocean? Yeah, like 80%.
Bro, what?
Well, you know, 70% of the sea—
Bro, think about it. Think about how much of the ocean we have not seen.
Think about it.
Aquaman, Jason.
I understand. I understand this.
My whole logic around aliens, and why it's been very hard for me to make the leap to any considerable percentage of me believing that aliens have ever been to Earth, is that I just feel like there'd be no reason for aliens to be creeping around, being scheming and hiding. There's no reason. It'd be like us hiding from ants.
For an alien to be technologically advanced to the point where it can travel to Earth, they'd be just as advanced to wipe us out without us ever even knowing they came here in the first place, which clearly hasn't happened. And in the event that they came here to farm whatever, or fuck with us, or teach us shit, they would just make themselves known. Why the fuck would they be hiding? That doesn't make sense to me.
But think about how much they would scare people if they just immediately came out of hiding.
Think about how much scaring a squirrel or an ant matters. Do you give a fuck about scaring an ant as you step over the anthill? Are you like, “Fuck, I have to cross the street. There's a big anthill coming up. I don't want to scare the fuck out of these ants”? You don't give a fuck.
I think—
I don't know.
Maybe it's like—
I love the alien discussion, by the way. But I think maybe it's like there's some level that we're supposed to get to before it's worth it to expose themselves to us.
Think about AI, right? Think about aliens, and think about AI. If you think AI is possibly the next superintelligence, it's getting smarter and smarter. Right now, it's competing with humans on certain test-taking things.
That's a lock, by the way. I don't know if that's a conspiracy, but that's a lock. I'm 99.999% positive that that's—
So if you think about AI—
Bad aliens?
What are you going to say now?
I wear coats.
“Take me to your leader” headass, bro.
Hopefully they like Chrome and skinny white hoes, because I got you on that. I got you.
Dang. What if that's how they're reproducing?
Throw them in vats.
Oh, man.
Right.
Oh, my God.
I don't know. I think my favorite conspiracy—the one I like arguing against and with—is that the moon landing was fake. That one is the best, bro.
There's no way the moon landing is fake.
Of course I agree. Of course you agree.
I think that was Photoshopped. I think that was not real.
Here we go, man. We were so close. We were so close, Trist. Brother, brother, brother, brother. Bill Clinton got impeached and removed as president because he got his dick sucked in the Oval Office. Two people knew that happened: him and the girl sucking his dick.
For the moon landing to be fake, I think there would have to be something like 100,000 people keeping that secret. It's impossible, bro. It's impossible.
Listen, when I don't know enough about a subject, I tend to lean on people who are much smarter than me in that area. Like Ansem with finance and tech—just talk to me, bro. I'm down to fucking follow you off a cliff. Let me know what I'm doing. Let me know what Zcash bet. Say less.
Neil deGrasse Tyson—when you listen to guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and astrophysicists who are fucking 500 IQ, and they're like, “It's such a trivial question to them,” Neil deGrasse is like, “Bro, it's a less-than-zero-percent chance that shit's fake.” You just got to—
Yeah, at some point it's like—
It's funny, bro. It can't be fake. There—
Flat Earth is even fucking crazier. That's like—get, like—
Shout-out Kai.
Fuck that fool. I'm just kidding, I like him, but fuck the flat-Earth shit. That's crazy.
Who's your favorite person that you play with in the NBA? Who's your favorite teammate of all time because of how they play? And who's your funniest teammate of all time?
Funniest teammate? I mean, I love Kevin Love. You guys have seen his Instagram when he was roasting; I can see that dark humor.
Yeah, his humor is dark.
I think Kevin Love was a reincarnated white guy. I think he was probably Black in his other life, because his humor is how the brothers be trolling. Kevin Love is definitely one of my favorite human beings.
As for teammates, I would probably say either LeBron or Kyrie, just because of watching what they were able to do.
Of course.
LeBron was one of one.
I mean, you saw them in the Finals both having 40 points against Golden State. Those guys were—
LeBron. I don't know how your answer isn't LeBron, right? It's like—yeah.
Yeah. Fucking legend, bro. That’s crazy.
Kyrie, I think, is one of the most talented players I’ve ever seen play. His handles are nuts. Kyrie is nuts.
He’s 6'2", but he plays like he’s 6'7". No one ever blocks his shot. He’s always able to get to the basket with his left hand, and he’s really right-handed. It’s crazy. I can’t wait for him to get back on the court. That’ll be good for the game.
Obviously, you have a serious money-making mindset and an entrepreneurial mindset, positioning yourself for the future, as you talked about earlier. How do you think AI is going to affect sports and basketball? How do you think it’s going to disrupt this market? Are there any plays you’re making, positions you’re taking, or anything you’re quietly building in the background that’s in line with that?
Yeah, I think health AI and health data—sports health—is the next step. If you look at the playoffs, I remember last year you had Tyrese Haliburton, Jayson Tatum, and Damian Lillard all tear their Achilles. We need the next step: How can AI technology, data, and research protect our athletes?
Like you said, the playoffs are the biggest stage. Losing your marquee guys isn’t good for basketball, and it’s not good for making money. For me, it’s figuring out how we can incorporate AI, sports medicine, player loads, and metrics to figure out the best way to keep guys on the court. That’s an issue. Everyone’s talking about load management, and guys are missing and skipping games, so I’m trying to figure that out.
It’s bad for the sport, bad for the viewership, and bad for the market. But it’s also life-shattering sometimes, right? In certain instances, whole careers get fucked up.
You know, for real. Especially guys who get hurt in their first year, or in their last year of college—that’s crazy. You know what I mean?
Yeah, just better coaching, right? Using AI technology to get better coaching. Not every coach is good. Just because you’re an NBA coach or a college coach doesn’t mean you’re good at it, right?
Better drills—and who knows? If AI had been around and you’d had a better coach, you might have been the next Luke Kennard.
You never know, brother. You never know.
You never know. I’m always dreaming and scheming, picking shit up and putting shit down. That’s actually where I think everyone is afforded an opportunity right now.
24. Mizkif joins
I think AI is very good. What I use it for in my day-to-day is optimizing the structure of my own life. One of my favorite things to ask Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever OpenClaw is: “What am I missing here? What are some blind spots? What can I be doing better? Be brutally honest. Don’t be biased. Don’t tell me what I want to hear.”
It’s just so good at finding that because it sees the whole view, whereas people get caught up in their own perspective. Is that Mizkif?
Hey, what’s up, man? Not all of us are here.
That’s our next guest. Yeah, there’s a little overlap.
You know what that means? It means TT has to get the fuck off, right?
That’s so good. This is fucking great, bro. Come on the show anytime you want. You’re the GOAT. You’re honestly the best.
Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Keep up the good work. One last thing: perception of reality is realer than reality itself. Never forget that. Come on now.
It’s true.
I believe that. Yo, mic drop. We appreciate you, man. You’re the GOAT. Come back soon.
Yes, yes. Love, love. Talk with me—we’re both in LA.
I will. I will, brother. Thank you.
Okay. All right, guys. Later.
All right, brother.
Dude, he’s the GOAT. He’s cool as fuck, bro.
I love him. He’s the best.
It’s going to hit so much harder now when I see him out at some random fucking party, event, or restaurant.
He’s smart. I’ve seen him many, many times.
Yeah, yeah, he is. I didn’t know he knew ball like that.
Oh, that’s good. Miz, where do you live again?
Unfortunately, not—
Mizkif the Entertainer. His name should be Mizkif the Entertainer. I think he should add that on the end.
He’s the exact opposite of what you are.
I’m literally the polar opposite personality.
I don’t think we’re that opposite.
No, we are, bro. We are.
You’re fucking up the average. You’re fucking up the ratio. It’s been me—I’m 6'5". Banks is 6'6". TJR is 6'5". What’s Tristan, 6'9"?
How tall are you, Miz?
Bro, who cares? What matters is that right now we’re on camera, and we’re all the same. All of us.
He said, “When I stand on my money, I’m tall.” It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. Look, that’s the beautiful thing about crypto and why we’re here, right? We’re all in exchange with each other, no matter what. We can all make money.
What the fuck are you talking about, bro?
Bro, shut your fucking ass up and bring up the P&L. Where are we at? Start at $300,000.
That’s what they’ve been saying to you for years.
Facts.
You’re right. You’re right. You’re right.
I kept the chat on for you today. Did you see that? The chat’s been on.
Yeah, I see it. They’re here. What’s up, chat? How are you guys doing?
I told you to keep the chat on.
Yeah, because it was emote-only.
He didn’t know that emote-only chat isn’t a good thing on Twitch.
Brother, I’m trying. I’m not a streamer. I’m not a streamer.
You’re learning. It’s fine. But yeah, it’s not the best.
I can talk shop. I can talk about the portfolio. If you guys don’t know what’s going on on FaZe Banks’ stream and what’s going on on Mizkif, I’m on the other side of the coin. I’m on Kick.
Basically, what I’m doing now is giving my chat $300,000 to invest. I become their financial adviser. I’m not really a financial adviser, but we’ve been investing heavily this week.
I think the last time I talked to you guys, we were up to $310,000 in the portfolio, right?
I think it was $303,000, but sure. Continue.
Okay, TJR, you hear that? He says $303,000. What if I told you guys we’re at $46,000?
Are you joking?
I swear to God. We’re at $46,000 right now.
That is fucking insane.
That’s sick as fuck, bro.
Wait, Miz, what?
He’s crushing it.
I’m not lying. What have you made? What has changed from last time? That’s $100,000 in a week.
AMD and something else, right?
AMD. Let’s see. AMD—we’re up $1,000.
Yep.
Well, that’s not $100,000. So where the fuck did the $100,000 come from?
Wait, wait, wait. Did you add money to the portfolio? Did you add capital?
Yeah, I gave him money.
I told you: Mizkif the Entertainer, bro. Why is that literally his name?
There is no fucking way.
Damn, bro. Did you start playing options? How did you make 30% on the total?
Yeah, we actually did give them options trading as well.
I was about to say, take my spot on the show, brother. This is fucking insane.
That’s insane. I was talking to production—I don’t know if this is too transparent—but I actually haven’t talked to Z or any of the Market Bubble people. We talked about you doing a Caleb Hammer-style one-on-one thing.
Yeah, I feel like there’s a way to do it. I feel like you should do it on this set, and maybe there could even be a way to work it into what we’re building here. I don’t know if that appeals to you at all.
Yeah, no, I’m down. Literally, when you messaged me, I was like, “All right.” People could build it in the bubble because I like that one-on-one Caleb Hammer thing. We could easily produce that.
I talked to the team, and they were like, “Yeah, that’s fucking super smooth, super easy.” I know you want it to just be—you know, they cast the person, sit down, boom, and then you do your thing.
They tell me to show up, and I show up, because I do have a full-time job right now. I’m working, so it’s kind of hard to—you know, my passion is finance and helping people with finance, but I have to do my actual real-time job to make money.
What’s your real-time job?
What I do right now? I’m a financial adviser for a bunch of degenerates.
So, jokes aside, you said the portfolio is set to what, $404,000? What did you say?
We’re currently at—I gave them an extra $100,000 today, so it’s not like they had it all week.
Nice.
After the great earnings and everything, with all the stocks they’ve had, they’re currently at $47,000.
Okay, so up seven bands. It’s chill.
That’s fire.
Yeah.
So I’ll tell you what happened. It’s been—
In 2 weeks. In 2 weeks total, right?
No, it’s been about—we started last Tuesday.
It’s been a week from today—no, Tuesday last week. What is that? Seven?
Oh—
No, no. Tuesday last week. What is that? Seven?
A week and 2 days. A week and 2 days.
9 days. So, the real killer for a lot of this—and actually what fucked them up the most—was CoreWeave. CoreWeave was the big problem here.
They got completely hammered on that because we bought emotionally. We were stupid. That was the one we said we liked based off the Leopold thing, right? We didn’t really like it. We obviously didn’t buy that; we would never do something as fucked as that. But that was the one that—the Leopold—is that the guy’s name? Leopold Aschenbrenner?
Leopold. Yeah. Aschenbrenner, the fucking GOAT.
So, look, I think it’s a great stock long term. They do have a lot of plays next year, and they actually have a lot in the back burner. But one problem is their earnings were definitely not the best.
And we bought the news, which I hate doing, and we fucked up. Then the next day it went down another 10%, and in total that position we’re down about $3,000.
I see.
Another stock that we were actually down a lot in was the play that we took from you guys last week.
Oh, MP is down. Yeah.
MP’s down.
We actually—chat, thank God we got out of MP, because, by the way, it was down 5% today.
So we would have had another bad day with MP, but MP has been down since I actually talked to you last.
It’s unfair. It’s unfair to assess it that way. We articulated very clearly that this is a longer-term play. We’re not investing to exit.
No, it’s fair. Nowadays, 2 weeks is a long time. You’ve got to understand what kind of market we’re in. We’re in a crazy market where every day you’re seeing 10%, 15%, or minus 15%. It’s a wild fucking goose chase right now. It’s true. He also brought up VVV, but you can’t invest in crypto. And I’m not touching Hyperliquid because fuck that.
Yeah, bro. At least if you’re going to talk shit, you’ve got to come on the comp, bro. If you’re going to talk shit, you’ve got to come on the comp.
Can I ask you a question? What happened with Hyperliquid? Because I saw—
Very good shit, brother. It’s a real product. It’s amazing. Coinbase—see? You tell them. You talk about it.
Wait, what are you going to ask? Go back real quick. He said, “What happened with Hyperliquid?” He saw news about it.
Well, I saw the news that apparently Anthropic was like, “Hey, look, that’s not us.” They were like, “Shares.”
So, yeah. Anthropic basically put out a statement saying that if you’re buying shares off somebody in an unofficial—not the official—round, there’s no way for people to officially directly sell their shares to somebody else, and it’s illegal. They were like, “We put that out in all of our docs. You can’t do that.” So, that was that. There is a perpetual on Hyperliquid that’s tracking the Anthropic price, but that’s not facilitating the sale and purchase of shares that somebody has in the actual equity. It’s not the same thing, but that is what—
Can you explain to me how that works, though? I don’t understand how they put it at a $1.2 trillion valuation on Hyperliquid when it’s not even released yet. I just don’t understand how that works.
So, they get to speculate on a 5-year-old—
Yeah. So, what happens when they’re not tracked by an oracle? Typically, when you’re trading on some exchange, there’s an oracle connected to what the actual price of the asset is. But if the asset’s not trading publicly yet, it’s strictly based off the order book. There are obviously people long and short. For every position that you take on perpetuals, there’s somebody taking the opposite side of your position. Wherever the market demand and supply settles is how it prices the asset, but it’s also dependent on the knowledge people have of what’s going on in secondary sales and all of that.
The best example we just had happened this past week. We talked about it when you came on last time: Cerebras. There was a pre-IPO perpetual future of that stock. It wasn’t connected to the actual price of the stock because it hadn’t IPOed yet. They estimated that the round was going to be at $115 a share. Then they raised it to around $185 a share because there was so much demand, but on Hyperliquid, at the time, it was trading at $280.
Yes, I’ll pull it up. Where is it? Cerebras.
Miz, get in the middle of the screen. I’m going to take my fucking 10th piss of the day. That’s right, chat. This is my 10th time getting up to take a piss. I don’t know what’s fucking wrong with me. Polymarket, we need odds for next week. Actually, plus or minus 6 piss breaks. I really apologize, but—
I’m fucking 50 years old. Miz, get in the center. Scooch over a little bit.
Dude, you’re so fucking funny. You’re the entertainer.
But, yeah, a good example of this is Cerebras. The IPO happened literally today, but this market has been live on Hyperliquid since May 1st, so anybody could trade this market. It wasn’t connected to any oracle that reflected the actual price of the asset. It was really just determined by people buying and selling and trying to estimate what it was going to open at.
When it was announced that they were doing the round at $115 a share, it traded at $300, then traded down to $200. For the rest of the past week, it traded up to around $285. Then yesterday, they officially announced that they did the $5.5 billion round at $185 a share, but on Hyperliquid it didn’t match that price because people thought it was going to open higher on the market.
So, is it essentially like Polymarket, then, but for—
It’s kind of similar in predicting where something is going to open. There were actually Polymarket lines on where this was going to open, so it was similar in that way, but this is just another instrument for people to make predictions. The crazy part is that they were right. It opened at $350, and the announcement that it was going to open at $350 dropped today at around 10 a.m. When that dropped, it went from $280 to around $380, and now it’s at around $330.
It’s crazy because Hyperliquid was the venue where this price discovery happened for the biggest IPO this year. It’s pretty insane.
What about SpaceX? Is SpaceX on there?
SpaceX is a good question. Is SpaceX on here? I don’t think so yet, but I would bet—oh, they have this. This is lower liquidity, though. If you see this, this is a platform called Virtuals. The total liquidity is around $5 million, which is not a lot. The Cerebras IPO was on this other platform called TradeXYZ, and the liquidity was slightly higher.
I would imagine they’re also going to do SpaceX and all these other ones. Because they did so well with Cerebras, they’re probably going to do the other ones as well. But, yeah, SpaceX right now is here.
So, basically, this week, I’ll tell you what we did. We had a pretty weird week, I’m not going to lie to you. The market has been up; there’s been a lot of green going all the way. We were up and actually doing really well for a short period of time.
But then CoreWeave absolutely fucked us raw. That fucked us. The miners fucked us so hard.
Yeah.
Those 2 things beat us by more than anything else. Chat, was there anything else that we really got fucked on? It was CoreWeave. We lost about $4,000 in profit right there. We got fucked on a coffee trade. One of my friends told us to get into coffee.
Oh, wow.
And Hims screwed us. Hims absolutely—
Oh, yeah. Hims. Hims’ earnings were bad. I did see that happen. Hims was bad.
The 2 stocks that I mentioned when I came on your stream the day before we did the show—I said Intel and I said Take-Two. They’re both up. Just saying.
That is true. That is true.
Just saying. Go check the VOD.
Okay.
And you both like GTA 6, so Take-Two is a good one.
Take-Two is up, but it’s also based on the fact that someone at Best Buy showed that they previously leaked, by accident, the fact that it’s coming up for preorder on May 18th or some shit.
Is that why?
Yeah.
Wow. I didn’t even know that.
Yeah, because Best Buy has been shown to leak it, and people have leaked it. They’re leaking it right now. It’s kind of just a rumor.
Look at this fucking response to this tweet: “Is Banks getting paid to push this narrative?” There’s a clip that just went up: “Banks speaks on GTA 6,” whatever. “Is Banks getting paid to push this narrative?” Here we go, man. Here we go. Yeah, Take-Two, paying me big, big bucks. Take-Two, you fucking suckers.
Banks, the thing is, I never look at this kind of stuff because I know it’s pointless, dude. That’s why you just have to move on.
No, no, no. I’m—oh, give me a fucking break, man. Shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
Well, we’ve got to hear about that.
We’ve got to hear about Amouranth 25 times a stream. You’re doing finance trading, and it’s like, “Why don’t I like AMD?” “Oh, it’s because that one time Emiru…” Please, man.
Who’s Emiru?
Okay, well, I actually bought it. I actually went against the fundamentals. Okay, so you’re wrong.
What’s Emiru? Emiru’s stock is—
RBLX. Even GTA isn’t turning people into millionaires. Just remember this tweet, because this kid’s a fuck-up and flopped like crypto. I got into ETH at $800. I got into Solana at $8 and still lost half a million dollars in Solana.
Have you ever thought about how FaZe had Streamer of the Year 2 years in a row? Fuck yourselves. Shout-out Stable Ronaldo, JasonTheWeen, Lacy, Silky, and Max. It was all you guys, baby. It was all you. I played some sort of role. Give me a fucking break, man. I played some sort of role.
I feel like I’m playing a game and listening to the same story. I’m trying to skip the cutscene, but I can’t.
So, are you trying to get your instant get-back because of the Emiru jab? Is that—
Instant comeback? What are you talking about? My court case might be in 2028. This shit might be going on forever.
Also, I wanted to let you know something. We did take your advice and invest in therapy, which is what you need. No, we invested in Take-Two stock. We invested in Take-Two today, actually, because we’re buying the rumor that on May 18 they could be releasing the preorder. So, we’re excited about it.
I agree with you more than anyone that GTA 6 could make Take-Two a half-trillion-dollar company with how big GTA—
I agree. I said 10x. I said it should be 10x bigger than Roblox. That’s what I said.
I really do believe that. Right now, my chat believes that at least the rumor is worth buying, and we’re not here for a long time, right? They’re here to try to get 10% on a quick buy, and hopefully it goes through. Then they make their money.
Well, where’s the fucking chart? Is there an—
Do you guys use any leverage when you trade?
Do you let them use leverage?
That is a great question. No, I didn’t. The reason why I didn’t is that I wanted them to learn the fundamentals, because I don’t want them to get too degenerate.
But they also realized it’s my money, so they didn’t really give—
Look at us moving the market, by the way. Look at us moving the market. It was up 5%, and since we started the show, it’s up 7%. Maybe we are getting fucking paid. Surprise, motherfuckers.
25. NVDA 2x + Trump's VOO
No, look at this. When did GTA 5 come out?
2016, brother?
Yeah, like 10 years ago.
Come on now.
The best time to buy this was right before GTA 5 came out.
Come on, man. I do like the Take-Two thesis. I really do. I do like the Take-Two thesis.
I’m fucking telling you guys, listen—the people watching—you can bet your fucking dick that if he likes it and I like it—
Yeah, it’s a weird combo. It’s a weird combination of—
It is.
Because I like it for a totally different reason than he likes it. If his finance-tech shit doesn’t fuck with watches, doesn’t fuck with Chrome, hates me, hates fucking—
I don’t hate you.
If he likes it—
And I like it, I don’t know.
Wait, are you talking about me or him?
No, Banks. No—
Talking about Z.
No, bro, I know. I know you said you set up the group for World of Warcraft. Are you planning on doing something similar for GTA? Do you think you’re going to do something along those lines?
You didn’t set shit up in World of Warcraft. That’s number 1.
Yes, I did. I literally set up the entire thing. I made it. I was—
Brother, you came up with the idea. It was my idea. You sound like fucking FaZe Banks, bro. Shut the fuck up.
It was my idea. I got everyone together. I literally got me, Chance, Silky, Lacy, and BlackBoyMax, who was a mage. I literally got everyone together, and I brought them into Goldshire, where we collaborated and made the best content group in the entire world.
Shut the fuck up. You know what? Fuck it.
I believe you, bro. I do.
FaZe Mizkif, 2026.
There’s phasing, and I couldn’t stand it because I couldn’t see my guildmates. It’s something that’s very annoying.
I agree. We should get rid of FaZe.
Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?
Yes. Let’s talk about what we got into this week, which goes into what Z was talking about with leveraging. I didn’t want my chat to leverage because they’re a bunch of gamblers, but I think they wanted to make some serious profit.
So, we decided today to get into NVDL, which is 2x leverage on Nvidia, for $52,000.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, a big fucking play. The reason why is that the GOAT, the CEO of Nvidia, is currently in China, hanging out with everybody. He said—and I quote—“This is one of the most important meetings in the history of humanity.”
He’s saying that this is such an important meeting and that AI is so important that it’s going to change humanity and change the world. He also went over there, and it’s now confirmed that he’s working with China. Twenty-five percent of his work with Nvidia is going to be through China, which is huge, because a lot of people thought there were going to be a lot of problems with Nvidia and China.
Also, going into next week, the earnings are supposedly great—or we hope so. The last 18 out of 20 earnings have been green, and on earnings, on average, they go up about 8%. Also, in the last 8 consecutive quarters, they have beaten earnings. Now, the thing is, they beat earnings every quarter, but will they—
I’m listening, bro. I’m listening.
No, let’s wait for him.
I think his bladder is just fucked up. I don’t know. We might need to get him checked, to be honest. I’m not sure.
No, it’s a great thesis. I was listening to it. I think NVIDIA with China is huge because there are a lot of restrictions that Trump puts on NVIDIA and what they can sell to China. But if they’re able to sell their best GPUs instead of the lower-tier ones, which is what it is now, they’ll make a lot more money.
It’s a great spot. I agree with you for sure.
It’s interesting that you did NVDL, bro. If you were on Hyperliquid, you could use leverage and cap your downside. The ETFs are limited in what they can provide. The only reason I ask is because I know it’s short-term, and I understand the parameters you want to give them around not risking a lot. But if you cap your downside and have a stop-loss wherever you want to get out, you could do some pretty cool things. That’s why I asked.
Well, we could do a trailing stop-loss.
Exactly. Yep.
Yeah, and that’s the plan. For me, it’s my money, so whatever. The chat’s trying to make some money and make this fun. I just want them to learn the fundamentals before they start getting deep into leverage, because—
It’s my money, so yeah, fuck around with it. But I do want them to learn, like, hey—
Yeah.
You’re in a situation right now where the next 5 years are really going to determine the rest of people’s lives because of AI and everything else and all that crap that chat’s so tired of hearing about. But if you capitalize on the now and learn long-term investing—Trump literally just got leaked today. He’s deeply invested in VOO. The president, who’s connected with all these companies, is just buying the fucking S&P 500.
We talked earlier in the episode, and basically the topic of the episode has been attention. Ansem hit us with a fucking bar to kick things off. He said—I think it was—“Attention is the new EBITDA.”
Yep.
That’s a fucking bar, but it’s also very, very real. We drew the same metaphor. Trump is like the new KOL, the top-leading stock KOL. A KOL in crypto is a key opinion leader—whatever the fuck. Basically, crypto influencers are called KOLs.
Yeah, but I don’t think chat’s sick of hearing it. I think it’s important to fucking drill that into their heads. Everything that you’re doing is probably the most valuable—genuinely, and I mean this with the utmost respect—the most valuable content you’ve ever fucking made is trying to teach people legitimate financial literacy and getting them prepared for these next 5 to 10 years.
We fucking say it in every intro, and it’s the entire point of this show.
Yeah.
It’s completely in line. It’s good that that’s where your head’s at. You know what’s interesting to me?
I want to hear the rest of your—sorry, I don’t want to cut you off.
Yeah. You know, go ahead. Go ahead.
I wanted to hear the rest of your NVIDIA thesis.
Obviously, Wednesday is their earnings, and that's going to be exciting. We're hoping and praying that it goes well, because if it does, our entire portfolio is going to skyrocket and the chat is going to have a fiesta.
FaZe Banks is on his phone right now buying NVDL leverage. He's excited about it as well, and then he brings me on the show to know what to buy next.
We also got into electronics a little bit. We got into this thing called LWLG. You're not going to believe me on why we got involved in this. LWLG is a small company. We bought $20,000 worth today. It's called Lightwave Logic. You're probably saying, “What the hell is that?” I don't know. They basically are trying to get rid of copper and use lights and lasers because it's faster and cheaper for the technology.
They had bad earnings today, so they dropped 18%. But we decided to buy.
The reason why we bought is that I called the company. I called them because, on Google, their headquarters is basically just a barren store.
You called them? You called the company?
Yes. Dude, the woman who picked up was so hot. I can't even explain it. You know when you call a woman and she just woke up from a nap and has that really sexy voice? That's what she had, dude.
She laughed at my joke. I told her it looked like a barren T.J. Maxx, and she laughed. I'm like, “Dude, I'm in love.” So now I'm in with her, right? I actually wanted to invest. My chat only wanted to do $10,000, but I put in $20,000 because I'm in love.
We also got in with this—and I swear to God, this is true—there's a guy in my Discord named “The Jewish Guy,” and he told me that he went to the synagogue. He said the synagogue told him that it's a good buy.
Oh, wow. Are you a faith man?
Are you Jewish? Are you Jewish?
Yes, I am Jewish.
You are Jewish?
I don't think he actually is. You can't trust a word this kid says. He's Jewish.
So you're saying you can't trust a Jewish guy? You really want to say that on Twitch? I mean, it's Twitch. You could say that women should be prostitutes.
Stop, stop.
One of the things we were talking about earlier, before we started the show, was how AI has kind of taken away—or might take away—the purpose that some people have in their lives because the jobs they currently have might not be as important.
As a counterbalance to that, I think religion and faith are actually going to do really well over the next few years. I think people are going to go back to them for a source of purpose and truth. I also think it's going to help with the current social situation involving relationships. Marriage rates are down, a lot of the trends around family structure are down, and religion is kind of a counterbalance to that.
Yeah, people want hope. I think a big reason for that is that our generation was so against religion because it was shoved down our throats. But now that we're the parents, and now that we're the people teaching them, we don't teach religion as much.
People want to feel some kind of connection and some kind of tribalism that we just don't have anymore.
Look at this graph.
Religion—we had an AI singularity. Yeah.
This chart is looking at the people who identify as religious versus the people who don't. That's what the blue line is.
Yeah, the blue line is religious versus not religious.
We should buy leveraged wine companies because, obviously, if the church is going to start seeing more people, wine should go up in value, right? Smart. Really smart.
We should also get into infrastructure companies, like wood stocks, because they have pews. Pews are going to be growing as well, right?
Pew and wine. Yeah, I like it. I like both theses.
See, chat, there's always money to be made. That's why you always have to think, “What can I do to make money in this situation?” The answer is there's usually a way. There's always a way. There literally is always a way.
It's interesting because you would assume that if markets are up, religion would be down. I feel like when people are losing money or markets are down, that's when you would see religion trend up. I wonder what other examples in history show religion and markets trending up at the same time, or trending down at the same time. You would expect—
You know what's actually trending up right now as we speak, John? The NVDL purchase that they made is currently up over $1,200 since they purchased it just an hour ago.
Nice.
They are up $1,200 on the day. So what is that showing you, chat? What is that showing after hours? That big buy—boom, right here. It's saying, “Hey, we know we still have a lot of room to grow, and we are confident.” Let's cash out, chat.
Mizkif, I think the reason, like you said, religion usually would not be trending with markets is that the people who are making a lot of money in the markets aren't everybody. There are a lot of people who just don't have the discretionary capital to invest and actually aren't benefiting from all this AI boom that's currently happening.
The economy is in a really strong K-shape right now. The people at the top are making a ton of money, while the people at the bottom aren't making a lot of money at all. I think we're erasing the middle-class area, or the middle-class area is a lot more differentiated now than it was before. That's the main reason why it's not fully aligned.
That's why I think it's best to help out the chat as much as I can. I do plan to make this go to $1 million. I would love to get this to $5 million one day. Just imagine if I'm able to make it so chat can literally make money investing with me. I don't care about the money, so they're just making some money.
You care about the money, bro. I'm sorry. I have to stop you. Stop. Knock that off.
No, I don't. I don't.
Please, man. Please.
No, listen. I don't care about that money because I make enough money. I would care about that money if I wasn't making revenue from it. But every day I make money from that money, so I don't care. That money is whatever, as long as it doesn't go to zero. But there's no way my chat is that stupid that they're going to make me lose $400,000, right?
I don't think it sounds smart. I mean, they've made some good investments. It seems like they're smart, too.
I mean, a Twitch chat beat Pokémon, right?
They did. I was there.
You never saw Twitch Plays Pokémon? It's one of my favorite weird little social-media experiments of all time.
I love the game—what's the game where you could go catch Pokémon? It was—
Pokémon Go.
Pokémon GO. I love Pokémon GO. That was fun.
It was the best.
I had a lot of fun with that.
Yeah, Twitch Plays Pokémon was a very good time.
I believe it was 2015 or 2016. Bitcoin was at $452.12.
Basically, they let the chat put in the inputs for the game—move up, move down, select. The chat played through the game, and it beat the game. It went through and beat the game. There's all this lore around it, like the lineup of Pokémon and all their names.
Wait, so it just took the inputs as people pushed them immediately? Every message was a different input?
They democratized the inputs of the chat. If enough people in the chat voted for the character to move one space up, he would move one space up.
Yes.
Or to switch the Pokémon or whatever.
That's cool.
It was a good time. I do have to run, though, boys, because I have a World of Warcraft raid. Tier 5 is coming out. We're doing SSC and TK tonight, so I have to go do that.
I care about it.
Oh yeah, you do care. Yeah, Tier 5.
I want to see Ansem playing WoW on Mizkif's stream, and I want to see Mizkif trading in this competition on Ansem's stream. That's what I want to see.
Yeah, I got the message, chat. I'm actually going to put in $25,000 and see if I can beat them with the content for what you're doing.
Can I have my chat do it with my money and just go buck wild in the dumbest trades?
100%, bro. Yeah.
Okay.
You can leverage on everything. You can do whatever you want with it, chat. What if we do $25,000 of dumb shit where you guys—
Well, don’t do dumb shit. Try to win. If your chat beats the most profound traders in crypto, which would be funny as shit, it’d be insane. It’d be huge, you know what I mean? So take big swings and do risky, crazy shit. Not dumb shit, though.
Yes. I think if we get—who won? Oh, a chat room of dumb shits. And how did they win? A guy named the Jewish guy on Discord told them what to get from the synagogue. They listened to him as their almighty leader and picked those stocks.
They were 10× long NVIDIA into earnings.
Miz, you should get wrapped. You know how they do it? They wrap the thing around their arm. You should have them come wrap you and do a whole fucking prayer before the competition on your—
Oh, like my prayer to win? Yeah. Have the fuckers pull up.
How Jewish are you? Like, super Jewish? Like—
He’s not Jewish.
I lie. Wait, my friend. I actually don’t lie.
Somebody in the chat—I’ll pay you. I’ll send you $1,000 in Solana if you go clip every single moment in this. You’ve been on for 30 minutes where Mizkif lied, and tally it up a little in the top right. Share that clip with me. I’ll definitely see it. Just tweet it at Market Bubble. I will see it. I will send you $1,000.
I literally just linked your VOD. Give me $1,000.
You have to edit it and clip it. Get the fuck off the show, man. Go have fun. No, we love Miz. Miz, thank you for coming on.
Miz is funny.
Bro, that was super funny.
He’s funny. They’re crushing him, too. They’re actually doing well. They’re—
They’re doing all right. The $100,000 he had us both thinking he made—that was crazy.
I was listening like, “Okay, what?” That’s why I asked about leverage. You had to be leveraged somehow to make $100,000 that quickly. That’s fucking insane.
What was that?
He’s talking about somebody responding to the tweet. They said, “Respect to Banks for admitting losses, but I do believe Ansem is lying. If he feeds him alpha, he should have made some profit during the past couple of years.”
Well, see, the thing is—
Who, me?
Yeah, you. They’re talking about me.
I have made some profit in the past couple of years. You and I have never talked about stocks, first of all, before producing the show.
I’ve only ever asked you about your opinion in crypto, and it’s been a very quiet conversation the last couple of years. You haven’t had any serious advice for me.
What is the one? I think I gave you advice once. Didn’t I tell you to sell SOL and buy HYPE?
Sell SOL and buy HYPE. Didn’t I tell you to sell?
Yes. Yes. I’m just a fucking idiot. We also talked about Zcash on the call three days before the show. It was at $400, you know what I mean? It ran to fucking $600, and I was like, “Should I put $500,000 in here?” You were like, “Yeah, dude. Fucking do it.” You don’t speak like that, and I’m like, “Fuck, that really—” You know what I mean?
Whatever. But that’s fucking funny, bro. Yeah, we haven’t really talked about markets at all on other shit, to be honest.
Once I get a good little system in place, we’re printing, brother. We’re printing. We’re fucking hitting the pipe twice on this fucking show, let me tell you.
For sure.
We’re making money in markets.
For sure.
We’re already up.
Why do people think the liar thing is crazy, bro? You tweet 80 times a day, probably more, and you overshare your thoughts on shit.
Bro, I think it’s funny because I don’t even delete anything. When I lose a lot of money, it’s public. They know I lost a lot of money because I get clowned for losing a lot of money. I don’t even know how people could say I’m lying. It doesn’t make sense.
It’s crazy. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
Oh, shit.
There was something that we talked about, though, that I want to get closer into. Oh, it was the marriage. It was the religion and marriage.
We’re seeing religion trend up.
And you would think that marriage would—
I think this is it. Yeah. You would think that—
You would think that marriage would be in line.
Yeah. Yeah. You would think that marriage would be in line with religion trending up, but it’s obviously not. This is crazy. I saw this tweet, and I’m like, “We have to talk about this.”
God damn.
Americans married by age 30.
Yeah.
Let’s really get into this.
Yeah.
In 1975, 91% of women and 81% of men.
Yeah, and as you can see, decade to decade, it has gradually plummeted. The marriage rate has collapsed, fully—from 81% of men to 16.5% by age 30. That’s fucking insane. People used to own houses, be married, and be on their third kid by 30.
Damn.
It’s being phased out of existence, bro. The falloff from 1975 to 2025 is fucking insane.
Yeah. We’ve got to get married, bro.
Neither of us—I mean, we are the statistic, by the way. I’m 34. I’m not married. You’re fucking—how old are you? 32? 31?
And you’re not married either. It’s fucking crazy.
It is interesting, though. We’ve talked about it a lot—the fucking impact of social media and all this stuff. The difference in how both genders now have jobs, and women aren’t as dependent on men, has affected things a lot. People have a lot more options. There’s a ton of stuff that affected it.
I actually lived with Mike. There was a tweet I thought would be funny to share because Trader Mayne is obviously a friend of the show. He was supposed to come on as well. He said, “Unbelievable levels of cope,” as his response to this clip. But let’s watch the clip.
It comes at you really fast. You go from 20 to 30 to 40 very quickly. I didn’t intend on all this happening so quickly.
And a lot of times, when you get older—especially in the world that we live in now, where people aren’t connecting in the same way they used to—the new social norm is that your best friend is your phone. People aren’t dating the same way they used to. They’re not looking at relationships the same way. The birth rate is down, the divorce rate is up, and the marriage rate is down.
You’ll start seeing people adventuring more. You’ll start seeing people connecting to old hobbies more and staying in touch with the things that they love to do all the way into their later years. It’s been tough being a trailblazer for that and being somebody in their 40s who has just not wanted to do that. I’ve just not been called to settle down and go behind a white picket fence, get a rocking chair, and bleed into the darkness.
I want to fucking squeeze every ounce of life out of this, dude. I want to adventure. I want to see the world. I want to travel. I want to get to know everybody and help as many people as I can.
Clearly, a lot of other people agree with that, or are in line in some way, shape, or form with that. I think the biggest takeaway from this clip—and the kind of unlock for me—was, “Your phone’s your best friend.”
Yeah, that’s true.
Which is the bar. I think about it—I’m seeing this girl, and we spend a lot of time just side by side in bed on our phones, scrolling. You know, a little phone time. I’m sure that’s a very common thing for people, but that didn’t exist for a long, long, long time—for the overwhelming majority of human history.
Now, coupled with the fact that social media and the internet in general just feed you this crazy view of options, what seems like endless options, I don’t know. A lot of people experience being dissatisfied with where they’re at in life, or just wanting to be somewhere else—somewhere that they’re not. It’s fucking—obviously, it’s having a horrible adverse effect on marriage and the way people are dating. The incel rate’s up. This is totally in line with dating being absolutely fried. It’s insane.
Yeah, I think it’s because the social norms change so quickly that people haven’t had time to respond to how different relationships are now. I think if you find somebody that you’re aligned with, what it looks like, what you want to rely on them for, and those conversations just have to be pretty transparent.
A lot of people rely on social media to feed whatever their inputs are, so they aren’t having those conversations with people about what they actually want out of relationships. Before, it was pretty straightforward. It was like, the man makes the money, the woman relies on the man for this, and you get married to have kids. It was pretty straightforward. But now it’s not as straightforward.
Maybe marriage is a broken structure anyway. Maybe it’s just a backwards way of approaching life and building some sort of family in 2026, because people are obviously falling off of it. I think the fix, in my mind—and I’ve had this conversation before; it wasn’t in line with what we’re talking about now—is that I’ve always thought about life in terms of this: obviously, I’m 34. I would love to have a family. I would love to be married. But I have a certain little checklist and criteria for the type of person that I’m looking for.
First and foremost, I want to identify the qualities in a woman that I would find in a really good mother. That is my first and foremost thing. A nonstarter above all else is, “Is this woman going to be a great mom?” When I feel like I’ve identified that, the next girl that I date, the next girl that I call my girlfriend, I’m at that age where it’s like, we’re just having kids; we’re starting a family. I feel like that approach is a little bit smarter rather than, “Let’s get married, go down that route, and then talk about having kids,” because that’s typically the—
No, that’s dumb. It doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to—I agree with you. I’m agreeing with what you’re saying.
26. AI profile of you
Okay, okay, okay. In my mind, I’m just like, traditionally, the order of operations—the way people fall in love, start families, and get married—is that it starts in lust, right? You meet a girl and you’re fucking like, “Oh my God, this bitch is bad. I fucking love this girl. I’m obsessed with her.” You consume her like a drug. You think about her nonstop. You’re obsessed all day. You guys fuck all day. That’s the energy. It’s very fiery. It’s fresh, it’s new, and it’s all rooted in your physical attraction to them and just that very drug-fueled, almost manic connection that you have with somebody.
Lust, right? Fiery, whatever, explosive. That’s typically how shit starts, right? Then you settle into this best-friend dynamic, almost a partnership dynamic, where that settles down a little bit, plateaus out, and calms down. You go from fucking 10 times a day to fucking once or twice a day. This is your best friend. They know everything about you, and they’re your partner in life, which changes the whole dynamic. You’ve got to survive that dynamic now, too, right?
The next leg up is marriage, where you go and promise somebody forever: “Let’s be together forever.” You’ve got to keep in mind, too, that we change so dramatically as human beings. I am a totally different person now than I was 5 years ago, right? The girl that I’m with or seeing could say the same, and the same will be true 5 years from now. So it’s a little bit naive to think, especially with all these moving pieces—social media, so much happening, so many options—that this girl 5 years from now and myself 5 years from now are going to be just as compatible. It’s going to work the same. We’re going to be just as much in love, and this marriage is going to work.
I think it’s just naive to take such a big fucking swing or bet on that, and then you’re supposed to have kids after that, right? Obviously, these dynamics change the way that we behave with each other through the whole thing. So when kids are the last part of the conversation and marriage is the first, it’s like, how the fuck do you get there?
Yeah.
It’s no wonder why there’s a falloff. Whereas, I think I’m going to have very early conversations with the mother of my kids like, “Yo, I think that we would make incredibly tall, attractive, intelligent babies, and I think that you’d be a fucking great mom for X, Y, and Z reasons.” This is the role that I want to play in it, and this is the role that I want you to play in it.
In good faith, you want it to work, and if we can be together forever—storybook ending, awesome. But in the event that it doesn’t, you’re setting yourself up for the least potential failure, I think. In the event that you start the relationship in that way, it makes it infinitely more easy down the road if it doesn’t work between you guys. It wasn’t rooted in lust or ego or any of that superficial shit. It’s like, “You’re going to be a great dad. I’m going to be a great mom. Let’s build a fucking amazing family.”
In the event that we don’t work out, I could still sit at fucking Christmas dinner with you and your new husband and have a great relationship with him because he’s involved in our kids’ lives, and we just build a fucking really successful family.
I don’t know.
I know I just went off, but—
Dang. That’s the most cogent take you’ve had so far. That was great.
Well, if I know one thing, chat, it’s fucking hoes. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.
No, bro. That’s not actually true. I mean, it’s very true. I think the core reason for marriage is building a family—building the generations after you. For sure, I definitely agree with all that.
But yeah, bro, 60% is nuts. What the fuck?
And the pessimistic take is: how do we solve this? What’s the fix? Dating incel all the way up, right? The rates are skyrocketing. Dating is fried. It’s cooked. Everybody experiences this. We’ve already pinpointed the reason: people are very much disconnected physically from each other. They’re on screens, they’re online, and they’re not developing properly socially.
Obviously, OnlyFans, porn, social media, et cetera—there are way too many cheap, quick fixes to fill that gap, fill that urge, and fill that need.
They’re more artificial and take away from dating. Obviously, the dating market with social media and shit is fried for a million different reasons. We know this, and I think that while people are expecting AI to cook it even further, I actually think, genuinely—and I’m pretty pessimistic, especially when it comes to the next 5 to 10 years as far as AI—I actually think AI could be the final solution to dating.
Really? How?
I do. I just think, in line with how I use AI, what I’m asking it to do is build kind of a fucking profile on me—what my interests are and how I like to live my life. I expect eventually AI to understand me better than I understand myself and be able to identify preferences that I might have that I didn’t even know I had.
Kind of what I’m getting at is, imagine Tinder had a baby with Claude and it built a real-time profile about you. You give it access to your emails, the way you spend money, your career, your interests, what you do day to day, what you like to eat, where you like to travel, your fucking religious beliefs, your physical biases and preferences.
Again, you probably are only able to identify, accept, or admit to 10% of what I’m describing, whereas it could have a whole, total 100% view. Then I think there was a Black Mirror episode about this where it kind of shuffles through and filters through potential perfect matches. With data and stats, it tells you, “Hey, in your fucking 100-mile radius, this girl Rebecca in Orange County is literally your soulmate. There’s a 100% guarantee that you guys are going to get along and laugh together and love each other. We just know it.”
Then you meet Rebecca and you’re like—even if they’re only 70% of the way there, and you’re with this girl for a year, and you’re dating, you’re there. I don’t know.
I think it’s a really good idea, but, bro, you might need to build that. Start working with Claude Code or Codex—one of them—and get to work on it. It’s a good idea.
I think this—this is—
Yeah, this is kind of in line with AI fucking girlfriends and OnlyFans. People are really grim and fucking dark. I think people would read a headline like this and be like, “Fuck, that’s dark.” Imagine a girl fucking dumps you and you can just have AI recreate her and continue that relationship without her.
That’s crazy.
It’s really sick. It’s really, really sick. It is. It is dark. But if it’s able to do that, if it’s capable of doing that, it has to be just as well-equipped and capable of actually finding a meaningful connection between 2 real people, which I don’t think you’ll ever be able to replace. You know what I mean?
Yeah, that’s true.
I don’t know. It’s an interesting topic. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
There is literally a Black Mirror episode. I think it’s called “Hang the DJ.” I’m seeing that. I don’t have any clips on it, but it’s an AI Tinder episode. Maybe we watch that. Everybody at home, you should go watch that. You should run through Black Mirror if you’ve never seen Black Mirror.
We use the term “Black Mirror-esque” a lot. It’s interesting because Black Mirror came out in, I think, 2011.
So, there’s been a substantial amount of time between its release and today—15 years. Try to remember, if you’re old enough. I know there are probably a lot of younger people. I know we’re old as dirt over here, but if you’re closer to me in age, try to remember where you were when that show came out and how dystopian it felt, and how it’s like, we’re here. We’re there. We’re 15 years in the future from when that show came out, and it’s Black Mirror, bro.
Yeah. A lot of the shit that people thought would never even happen is currently, literally happening. It’s pretty crazy.
I think we’re about to hit the 4-hour mark. Exactly. Damn. Four hours.
Production, how many seconds until four hours?
10 seconds.
Four.
Give me a countdown.
Five.
That was a Silky. That was me farming a Silky clip.
I think I saw somewhere that he ends streams at 4 hours. See, brother, I’m a fan, bro.
I’m a fan.
Did it just hit the 4-hour mark?
I think so. Yeah. What’s that for?
What the fuck?
So stupid.
I don’t even know if that’s the right clip. I came up with that shit on the fly. Maybe I am a streamer. Fuck it. Maybe I am. Maybe I should stream every day. Maybe we should scale this show to every day. I think the fucking people need it, bro.
Brother, I love this show. Episode 3. This is going to be the fucking one. If you want to know what Market Bubble is, just watch this VOD, bro.
This was good. It was—
This was fucking awesome, bro. This episode was awesome. And honestly, we had every reason and everything happen to make it not great.
We had some shit along the way. We did.
We had the 2 original guests bail at the last minute, and it’s not on them. There were emergencies. TraderMan, we fucking love you. Eric, we would love to have you on, obviously, next week, and follow through with that. But this feels great. This was a lot of fun and definitely a great conversation. Yeah. No, definitely. I like—
Anything. Miz has got to be a funny little side character.
We’re blending the world right now. We’re literally blending them in real time with the crypto world, and then we have the streamer—
Twitch, and we’re blending them together. I think it’s going to be cool to have them in the comp.
Like we talked about a little bit on the last show, we’ve actually got a lot of sign-ups so far. A lot of the comments people put for why they want to be in the comp are that they don’t fuck with me or think they’re a better trader than me, so I think that’s hilarious. We’re going to start that next week. It costs $25K to sign up, and then the winner is going to get $100K. It’s going to run for 4 weeks.
There’s also another comp going on right now. It’s live on Bullpen. This competition is with Trade Paragon, which is also a platform that trades the HIP-3 markets on Hyperliquid. Right now, you can trade Others, which is Others Altcoin Dominance; you can trade Bitcoin Dominance; and you can trade a few different indices on the platform. The winner of this competition is going to get $25K.
They’re also adding some cool markets. They’re adding, I think, an H100 market to track compute prices and how much people are spending on compute. They’re doing some cool stuff.
Amazing.
Yeah.
The Discord is important as well. You’ve been updating the Discord on your trades.
No, yeah, I need to do that. I will do that, though.
From here until next week, we’ll get better with that. We’re going to start bringing people up from the community. We want to talk to you guys, talk about your ideas, and get your feedback on the show. The overall vision for this is eventually being able to invest in people, ideas, and markets live, add some sort of element to that, and expand on this idea in more and more entertaining ways while ramping up production.
I think there’s a massive gap in this market for that. Who better than me? I’ve got 15 years of experience. If there’s one thing I can contribute to this amazing thing that we’re building, I feel like it’s that.
I think that’s it, man.
We’re not slowing down. We’re ramping this shit up, if anything.